There are two ways to forge a personal connection with a place: One is to have a meaningful experience there, making a city or a country an incubator of memory. The other, increasingly common in a media-saturated age, is to form a connection with a place through a book, a song, maybe a play — then travel to that place. How does the connection hold up now?

I had the second kind of experience with Santiago, Chile’s maximum metropolis. It is a city I first encountered through motion pictures when I worked as a film critic for a San Francisco newspaper. Years before I actually went to Santiago, I had a distinct picture of it in my mind’s eye — actually, two pictures. One picture was dark and disturbing, the other seductive and melancholic. The movies were Missing and Il Postino.

It would be hard to find more dissimilar films. Missing, a political drama released in 1982, was set in Santiago but was not shot there for political reasons. A dramatized version of the real-life disappearance and death of a young American journalist amid the violence of Chile’s 1973 military coup, this story cast a shadow on the reputation of Chile’s capital that stayed with me for years. Il Postino, a gentle, wistful romance released in 1994, was set in Italy and shot there. But the film’s fictionalized portrayal of the Italian exile of Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who lived in Santiago in a hillside aerie, established an emotional connection to the city for me.

These popular, influential movies left me with complicated feelings about Santiago. Still, when the chance to go there came along, I set off with keen anticipation, touching down at last in the city I had seen only on celluloid.

It was eerily quiet the day my wife and I arrived. We motored down broad Avenida Presidente Kennedy past deep-orange California poppies to the Grand Hyatt Hotel in the upscale Las Condes district. From our room, we stared, awe-struck, through lovely, curving picture windows at one of the most dramatic urban backdrops anywhere: the Andes, looming in the near-distance, draped in snow.

Still, the streets in Las Condes were oddly empty. And when we sipped pisco sours and dined on black snapper and rice in the Grand Hyatt’s Thai-themed Anakena restaurant, a hotel staffer, unbidden, tied Georgina’s purse to her chair. No problem, just an anticrime precaution, he murmured in a voice resembling those “in the unlikely event of a water landing” airplane announcements that are intended to reassure but don’t. Maybe our time here is going to be complicated, even dangerous, I mused.

I needn’t have worried. The streets of Las Condes filled up with people the next morning, following the Chilean national day celebrations, which drew local people to the Centro Cultural district, several miles from where we were staying. True innocents abroad, we hadn’t known about the holidays. Somewhat abashed, we belatedly headed to Centro Cultural ourselves on the efficient, clean and safe Metro de Santiago. We rose from the subway into a stylish 21st-century city of 6 million people. No untoward incidents occurred, and we never felt unsafe.

This, I thought, is a far cry from the battle-scarred city of fear I saw depicted in Missing nearly 30 years earlier. Forward-looking and business-minded, today’s Santiago is also distant from the city of love evoked by Neruda’s lyrical poetry, which is quoted throughout Il Postino. A part of me yearned to see that city, which I discovered travelers can do in a small but poignant way by visiting La Chascona, the house where the gregarious poet lived, threw legendary parties and wrote about nature, the passage of time, politics, love and literature. “I want to see thirst/In the syllables/Tough fire/In the sound/Feel through the dark/For the scream,’’ Neruda wrote.

La Chascona is now a museum, located in Santiago’s best-known bohemian neighborhood, Bellavista, a buzzy district of music clubs, shops, restaurants and bars. La Chascona is festooned with charming eccentricities, turrets and stairways and artworks by Neruda’s friends such as the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Here you can picture Neruda writing lines like these to an inamorata: “I want to do to you what spring does to the cherry trees.’‘

Back downtown, we saw the presidential palace, La Moneda, where socialist president Salvador Allende perished when forces commanded by arch-conservative Gen. Augusto Pinochet attacked the building. Pinochet ruled as a dictator from 1973 to 1990, when Chile returned to democracy. It is this democratic Chile, reborn and revitalized, that put imaginative sculptures in the colonial-era inner courtyard of La Moneda and installed a photo gallery under the plaza in front of the building, softening what could be a grim place without denying what happened there. Not far off, we found an attraction we hadn’t known existed, ensconced in the 1807 former Royal Customs House: The Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino, a museum devoted to the pre-Columbian art of indigenous people from Mexico to Tierra de Fuego. Georgina, an educator who owns a private school, bought a folk-music CD so she could give her students a sample of traditional Chilean culture. They, and we, fell in love with the music. We play it often, a tuneful souvenir of our visit.

I enjoyed modern Santiago fully as much as the old city — and again, this was something for which the movies hadn’t prepared me. Arrayed all around our second hotel, the smoothly run Santiago Ritz-Carlton in the El Golf district, were smartly designed contemporary buildings. Alternating high-rise offices and condos with low-rise shops and cafés to preserve view corridors, Santiago’s city planners put up buildings with artfully irregular shapes and sleek skins of glass and steel. Prosperous El Golf’s exceptionally fine architecture adds another layer of culture to the metropolis.

How did my mind’s-eye picture of Santiago hold up when I saw the real thing? It wasn’t entirely unreal, just incredibly incomplete, without nuance. And that’s the value of travel: It doesn’t simply give you more to see, it deepens your way of seeing. In the best possible sense, it’s complicated.