THE BOOK / ABOUT
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR
Erik Sadao
Erik Sadao grew up in São Paulo, and art reached him in small doses. A church ceiling, a borrowed magazine, a documentary that happened to be on television one afternoon. He was a curious kid, so he followed it, and the world started to feel larger than the room he was in.
He later studied Art History, first in São Paulo and then in Amsterdam. Most of what he knows, though, came from standing in front of the paintings themselves, in the cities that produced them, and staying there until they made sense.
Travel became the way to keep doing that. He spent more than twenty years in the Brazilian luxury travel industry, most of them at Teresa Perez, where he became a director and built trips for people who had been almost everywhere and needed a good reason to go back. The job taught him that a good itinerary is a piece of editing. What gets left out matters as much as what goes in.
In 2018 he moved to Amsterdam and co founded Sapiens Travel, a destination management company working across the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. As Head of Experiences, he shapes the days travellers spend in the region, together with a team of local Storykeepers who know these cities from the inside. He also writes about travel and art, is a partner at UNQUIET, a travel magazine published in Brazil, and supports Inspirar-te, an organisation that takes children from São Paulo's public schools to see art in person. It is, in a way, a chance to give other kids the church ceiling he once had.
Two ideas run through all of it. The first is that access to art should be wider than it is. The second is what he calls the cultural sustainability of a destination. When travellers connect with a place, with its art, its history and the people who keep both alive, something like affection sets in. And affectionate travellers behave differently. They come back, they look after what they found, and they carry the place with them long after the trip ends.
This book is that habit, written down. Twenty years of walking, reading and asking questions in these cities, gathered for anyone who wants to know them a little better.