In 1927, Modernist writer Mário de Andrade (1893-1945) left his city of São Paulo heading to Northern Brazil, in order tyo know and reveal a scarcely explored Brazil, often homogenized in the literature of traveling salesmen who had preceded him in such project. Symbolically, what resulted from this experience were notes that would only be collected in a parallel-definitive version around 1943. Under the form of a diary, the narrative about the facts of his trip through the northern region of his country composes the first part of his book The learning tourist, published in the seventies. This work intends to examine the tensions between those two layers of time: the present of the writing and the past as an experience of discovery. This narrative on palimpsest, extremely fragmented, lacking a final refurbishing by its author, allowed us to privilege its details, allegories, inflexions and, also, to underline its contradictions and the irony of Mario de Andrade s thought, elements that are considered to be indispensable for the building of his biography.