The early 1970s were pivotal years in Chile’s history. Salvador Allende became the world’s first democratically elected Marxist leader in 1971, promoting nationalization and social reform. In 1973, Gen. Augusto Pinochet directed the overthrow and assassination of President Allende, beginning a 16-year brutal dictatorship. Yet, in 1971, in the middle of major political changes, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Born in 1904, Neruda moved to Santiago at age 16 to attend college and was Chile’s best-known writer by the age of 20, when his erotically charged poems were published as Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. Neruda went on to become a Chilean diplomat, a member of his country’s Senate and a left-wing author who fled into exile from 1948 to1952 to avoid arrest.

When Neruda died in 1973, Chile’s right-wing president, Pinochet, forbade a public funeral, but thousands ignored a curfew and crowded into the streets of Santiago for a symbolic goodbye. For a glimpse of Neruda’s private life in Santiago, visit the eccentric La Chascona, the house where he lived with his mistress and third wife, the Chilean singer Matilde Urrutia, after whom the house was named. (Chasca means “hair” in Quechua, the Inca language, and chascona is a person with lots of unruly hair, one of Urrutia’s traits.) The house, built in 1955 in Barrio Bellavista, a bohemian neighborhood within the Providencia district, is maintained by the Pablo Neruda Foundation, which opens it to the public every day except Monday. It is filled with Neruda’s books, keepsakes and paintings, along with his Nobel Prize medal. There is also a wonderful portrait of Matilde Urrutia by the famous Mexican artist Diego Rivera.