Since the end of the 19th century, due to a series of circumstances related to national history, such as the Abolition of Slavery and the Proclamation of the Republic, there has been a growing modernization in the city of Rio de Janeiro, whether physical/urban or social /cultural. That process, although noticeable, was also time-consuming, but suffered, however, an abrupt acceleration in the beginning of the 20th century with the urban remodeling popularly called BotaAbaixo (roughthoully wreck those buildings) between the years 1903 and 1906, leading to the material transformation of downtown and the catalysis of the social maturation that was already underway. This eventful moment that inaugurates the brief and tropical Belle Époque of Rio de Janeiro instills a profound disturbance in the sensibility of Rio de Janeiro society, leading it to a series of internal rearrangements that galvanized in the perception of common sense the feeling that the city s history is divided in two. Also, it established the aesthetic and behavioral criteria that came to define what a carioca is, making such character, no matter how varied it is in its multiple presentations, as a specific type of citizen. This dissertation is the record of our research efforts to understand the historical and cultural continuities and discontinuities that contributed, in the physical/social environment of the city of Rio de Janeiro, to forge the modern version of its ethos. Above all, in what we may call a snip of time comprising its origins in the 19th to the beginning of the 1920s, our study aims the subjective and cultural effects that affected the population of Rio de Janeiro after the urban remodeling of the city until 1922, year on which Rio de Janeiro loses its hegemony, as São Paulo becomes a dominant player in what concerns modernity. As a background discussion, we also contemplate the possible influences that, subliminally, the urban planning mentality and the baroque ethos of the 17th century may have exerted on some levels both in the conception of the physical space in Rio, as in the constitution of the spirit of its citizens.