Itu
Itu is the city where a comedian's running joke became civic identity. Since the 1960s, the local comic Simplício built a career on the premise that everything in Itu is absurdly large — and somewhere along the way, the city leaned in. Today the Praça dos Exageros holds a seven-metre public telephone, giant chess pieces, and an oversized ATM, all kept company by the 18th-century Igreja Matriz de Nossa Senhora da Candelária, whose French organ and ceiling paintings predate the republic by a century.
But the joke is only the entry point. Itu is where Brazil's first Republican Convention was held in 1873, where the country's first telephone system rang in 1876, and where the cobblestone streets around Praça da Matriz still carry the proportions of a colonial trading town that once moved sugarcane and shaped a nation.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who return tend to mention Bar do Alemão first — open since 1902, still run by the Steiner family's descendants, and the kind of place where the afternoon stretches without asking permission. They also make time for the Parque Geológico do Varvito, whose 270-million-year-old layered rock formations reward anyone willing to look slowly.
Deals in Itu
Book directly at the providerHow Itu came to be
Domingos Fernandes, a bandeirante, founded Itu in 1610. It became a parish in 1653, a municipality in 1657, and a city by 1843 — each step shadowed by the sugarcane economy and, for two centuries, by the slave trade that powered it. By 1777 it was a significant trading outpost, its wealth visible in the Igreja Matriz completed in 1780 and its Aristide Cavaillé-Coll organ, installed in 1883.
The city's most consequential moment came in 1873, when the first Republican Convention in Brazil convened here — a gathering that helped set the course toward the republic proclaimed in 1889. Prudente de Morais, born in Itu on October 4, 1841, went on to become Brazil's third president and its first civilian head of state, the direct human outcome of that convention held in his hometown.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
May through August is the most comfortable window: temperatures hover between 25°C and 27°C, skies are mostly clear, and rainfall is light enough that a day on cobblestones stays pleasant. December through February brings heat, humidity, and heavy rain — the historic centre is still walkable in the mornings, but afternoons can be sodden.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.