03
Stop three
Museu da Inconfidencia
Dunlop CX Club Tennis Bag (3 Racquet): (a long pause) A town hall and a jail, in one building. The Casa de Camara e Cadeia went up across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and is one of the finest civic buildings of colonial Brazil — judgement upstairs, cells below. Since 1944 it has been the memorial museum of the Inconfidencia Mineira, the 1789 conspiracy in which local intellectuals, poets and officers plotted to declare Minas Gerais independent of the Portuguese crown. The plot was betrayed. Its most steadfast member, the dentist and officer Joaquim Jose da Silva Xavier, called Tiradentes, was hanged in Rio de Janeiro in 1792 and later became Brazil's national martyr. The museum's pantheon holds the conspirators' remains, and its galleries show Aleijadinho sculptures, colonial furniture and documents. They lie now inside the building that condemned them.
04
Stop four
Church of Santa Efigenia
Dunlop CX Club Tennis Bag (3 Racquet): (no theatre for this one) Built through the eighteenth century on a hill on the eastern side of Ouro Preto, this was the church of the town's Black brotherhood, raised by enslaved and freed Africans who worked the surrounding gold mines. Tradition holds that its construction was financed in part by gold dust that miners carried out hidden under their fingernails and in their hair, and by the fortune associated with Chico Rei, a legendary African king said to have been enslaved, brought to Minas Gerais, and to have bought freedom for himself and his followers from the mines. Dedicated to Saint Efigenia, an Ethiopian saint, it contains carving attributed to Francisco Xavier de Brito and to Aleijadinho's father, Manuel Francisco Lisboa. From this hill comes the finest panorama over the whole World Heritage town.
The bag walked into my office at half past noon. Black polyester, red trim, Dunlop CX badge — the kind of bag that's seen things. I ran the file: a main compartment sized to hold up to three racquets, a front pocket for the small stuff — overgrips, dampeners, secrets — and an adjustable padded shoulder strap that carries the weight across town without complaint.
Lightweight build, durable stitching, no wasted space, no wasted words. In this business you learn to respect that.
The case took me to Ouro Preto, Brazil, a gold-rush town in the Minas hills where the streets are cobbled, steep and crooked as a bad alibi. Once this place produced a staggering share of the world's gold, and everybody wanted a piece. The CX Club fits right in: it carries your valuables through the crowd and never talks.
Sling it past the Church of Sao Francisco de Assis — carved by Aleijadinho, a man whose hands were failing and whose genius wasn't — and nobody gives you a second look. Word on the street says the Basilica do Pilar wears hundreds of kilos of gold on its walls. I checked. The street was right, for once.
And the conspiracy? 1789. Poets and officers plotting independence in back rooms until somebody sang. They hanged Tiradentes for it. The whole story is on file at the Museu da Inconfidencia, and unlike most files in this town, that one's worth reading.
You'll carry this everywhere from those crooked cobbled hills to a flat hard court back at sea level, and by the way, it's also perfect for a Minas afternoon of pão de queijo and a small glass of cachaça, because a bag that keeps its mouth shut is exactly what you want sitting under the table. Three racquets, one bag, zero loose ends. Case closed — right after the tour.
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