All the gold of the world is useless if one can not show it off. This was not different in Vila Rica. Faith was one of the escape valves for accumulated power by sectors of the emergent Minas Gerais' society of the 18th century. Powerful and secular religious Orders portrayed the segmentation of the population. The Order of the powerful people, of the blacks, of the mulattos... Each one had as a purpose to build the most beautiful church, to demonstrate its power and influence. A kind of non-declared competition was initiated, of which gold was the fuel, and it spilled on altars, images and other liturgical pieces. Minas Gerais was living a Renaissance-type era, where there were patrons, the arts flourished and geniuses were born.

Stories are many and delicious. Masters such as Ataíde, Xavier de Brito, Servas and many others circulating by the streets, when they were not closed inside the temples, in the hard works of their art. The best known of them was Antônio Francisco Lisboa, eternally known as Aleijadinho (little crippled one), a mulatto genius suffering of a terrible deforming illness. Aleijadinho synthesizes the bankruptcy of the concept of good and evil. He was the ugly one who produced beauty, the monster who produced angels... Ouro Preto is just like that: interested faith, heroes inconfidentes. Those who visit the town must realize that it plays with childish references, it abuses of the contraries as well as it melts them.

In the cultural efervescence of the 18th century there was also room for poets, music and, as always, politics. The forbidden love between Tomás Antonio Gonzaga and his eternal Marília. He, a nobleman and secret revolutionary inconfidente; she, once a nearby companion, now a distant forbidden sweetheart. Both in passionate love with each other. "Cartas Chilenas" (Chilean letters) are attributed to him, an anonymous and disguised publication mocking the autocratic misdeeds of the former governor Cunha Menezes, referred to ironically in the pamphlets as a buffon. The mythological Chico Rei King, a one-time monarch in Africa, brought as a slave to Minas Gerais. He worked in the mines, eventually buying back his own freedom and of his former subjects. He ordered his own church temple built and died respectfully. In old Vila Rica gold was the only measure of value, no matter whom it belonged to. In Ouro Preto of today the walls seem to speak up, they sing their verses, suffocate their pain. They disclose much more than their visible and apparent architecture.