The
stalls bare gifts from all over the world, with handmade jewellery, antique
furniture, designer clothes and handbags, vintage scarves and sunglasses,
ornaments, silverware, woodwork, ethnic rugs etc. A brilliant haggle zone for
those who like trinkets and garments with a history and a reasonable price tag.
Finding Calvin Klein
dresses for €10 and Valentino T-shirts for
a fiver was pretty adrenalizing, however everything was VERY vintage, a little
bit too old school for my personal taste but nonetheless incredible
to discover. The streets were illuminated with vibrant colours and delicious
smells edging from the doorways of the patisseries – shopping in its most basic
but beautiful format. I felt like I had stepped through a time machine and
landed somewhere in the 1600’s.
I
wound up at a stall that sold old tarnished post cards; black and white with
early photographs of streets, cars and families on. As I was rummaging quite
fascinated through the piles and piles of paper the stall owner looked across
and asked me if I was English. “It’s the blonde hair, it stands out a mile” she
said with a strong North American accent – it turns out her and her husband moved
to Milan from North Carolina three years ago as she found trading her antiques
was a better business to host in Italy than it was in the USA. She told me the
earthy atmosphere here so much more fulfilling than sitting inside a dusty shop
– the market here called for her business and this is where it thrived.
The atmosphere overall
was wonderful, but it was very crowded so I was constantly clutching onto my
camera and handbag - a trick of the trade to successfully surviving in
the thriving city environment!
