After quite a while without posting I come back again thanks to the preasure somebody is doing these days.
Let's start with something simple: small hack to display a rotated pango text. I just copied the idea from pygtk mailing list but I didn't want to wait until I have my widgets realized to draw the rotated label.
So here you have the code and a small demonstration of the concept.
Thanks to jamesh for his nice explanation about colors, visuals, depth, and all those internal X concepts we all love.