The best place in the world is here and now: five defining places in Gil's life

Gilberto Gil's famous verses can throw light on his relationship with the places where he has lived or visited. 

The first stop, both in space and time, is in the small city of Ituaçu, where he spent a good part of his childhood and where he often returns in his dreams.

The first one is Ituaçu, a frequent dream of mine. Even now I still often dream of Ituaçu, that little city in the Bahian hinterland where I lived until I was 10 years old. So that's the first place, the most mythical one for me.

With its more urban ambiance and large Black population, Salvador is the second most important city for the singer as he was growing up. 

It was in Salvador that Gil became more closely involved in music, making some great friends in the process. He also discovered cultural and political movements and other kinds of existential rebellion.

Salvador, a Gilberto Gil as a child, a person, who wanted to be a musgueiro [his childish mispronunciation of the Portuguese word for musician], yeah? The individual taking ownership of his life, the first conversations with life, with the existential dimension.

His first visit to Rio de Janeiro in 1959 led him to discover a pulsating energy that was not only emitted by the city's famously exuberant nature, by the scent of salty water in the air between the mountains, but also by the music that spilled over into the streets in the city's southern zone …

… the home of bossa nova, the genre that the singer from Bahia loved.

His arrival in São Paulo was yet another stopover in a major city. This time, the impression left by the smell was not a very positive one, with the smog in the state capital proving annoying to visitors. 

Another memory that is quite strong is my memory of the smell, this was the third large city with yet another different smell. Much more steeped in smog and oil than Rio. And Rio was worse than Salvador. It was an assault on my nose, with so many different smells.

His exile in London is viewed by Gil as a time of huge personal change and musical learning. 

In the midst of the challenges of living so far away from home and being immersed in a new language and culture, the singer pursued his dream of fatherhood and furthered his talents by learning a new instrument.

It was somewhere I lived, the first time I lived outside Brazil. Three years, a family, my son was born…I learned a foreign language, played the electric guitar for the first time. I went out mostly at night, to places where I could listen to music.