The post-dictatorship reception of “Uma Casa Portuguesa,” both in Portugal and its diaspora, can be understood as one of both/and, not necessarily of either/or. Strong opinions continue to be voice on both sides: the song as regime propaganda versus the song as innocent. Vitor Pavāo dos Santos, in his book O Fado da Tua Voz: Amália e os Poetas (The fado of your voice: Amália and the poets), marks the song as one of the “greatest successes (perhaps the greatest?) in the history of Portuguese music” and writes, “It amazes me: ‘Uma Casa Portuguesa,’ a beautiful poem, so poorly judged by the simpleton intelligentsia reigning in Portugal, that took it for something salazarista (connected to the regime of the dictator Salazar).” He understands the lyrics as following in a poetic tradition of the pastoral or the bucolic and citing the ancient Roman poet Virgil, asks if it would be fair to say that Virgil was salazarista.
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