Urban space depictions often took its scenes from the new cityscape that emerged from the urban renewal of European cities during XIX century. In Lisbon, contemporary descriptions disclose two antithetical perceptions of the urban space and its landscape. The new town, that arose from the nineteenth century expansion, an open, wide and illuminated space, opposed to the old city that offered scarce possibilities of conversion to a progressive and technological ideal of the city ideal. This communication intends to explore, through some texts and authors, the way in which those changes of urban lands- cape were perceived, framed in the dialectic between a progressive ideal and the nostalgia of the past.