Antiques in Arezzo
Arezzo is famous for hosting Italy’s oldest and biggest antique market. The wares range from jewels and books, to art works, furniture, clothing, garden items, and random objects, the use for which one can pass many entertaining hours trying to ascertain!
The town itself was built on a hill, so the entire town slops up and down its often windy streets connecting you from a dizzying maze of piazza after piazza. Each piazza is circumferenced by amazing frescoed buildings, ancient churches - some aged into an amazing emerald green moss encasing the original stone, and one amazing cathedral parqueted with tiny black and white tiles. This is Arezzo’s 13th century Duomo (cathedral) that is famous for its stained glass masterpieces, it’s Gothic design and the artworks housed within.
Then there are the stone-fronted palazzos, whose apartment windows are lined with quaint planter boxes sprouting floral dashes of bold reds and yellows and greens, along with the freshly washed linen, pegged on pullied clothes lines under the windows. You can hear the sound of crisp linens whipping in the breeze.
Then of course, there are the restaurants and bars, the fashion stores and the vibrancy of the locals that fill the larger piazzas with life and the enchanting aroma of caffé!
But it is the antiques fair that draws everyone out into the streets. A market that seems to never end, as you meander through each street, pausing to look, to touch, to perhaps even buy one of the classical, or fantastical treasures. Sunday’s casual attitude buzzes in the air. The streets bustle as locals take their Sunday walks, wandering hand in hand between the stalls, gazing to look at some piece of furniture or try on some old-fashioned hats!
The wares themselves seem to shrink and expand according to the size of the piazza or street in which they are held. Narrow streets hold books and jewels, increasing in size until the central Piazza Grande, which lives up to its name by presenting large furniture pieces, art works and other not-so luggage-friendly items. It is almost impossible not to stumble across this Piazza. Everything colourful and grand, the piazza buzzing with the nattering of the stall holders, and the casual haggling of the buyers.
Some of the buildings in this piazza date back to the 12th and 13th centuries, and looking up to the tower of the noble palaces you can imagine the life of the past would have sounded not so different from today.
The sunlight rolls across the slope of the piazza, bouncing shards of sunshine back off the crackled mirrors on hundred-year old dressers, glimmering off the tables of brass wares that act like a xylophone of light. On the edges of the piazza, women sashay in and out of fashion boutiques wearing fancy hats and back-breaking high heels (on cobbled stone streets!). The air is filled with the aroma of bitter strong coffee, sipped in large quantities in the nearby coffee bars.
Searching for a restaurant means a turn down a peaceful side street, with stairs leading the way downstairs into deep set restaurants, burrowed in the slope of the hills. The locals can be heard laughing and often passionately debating amongst themselves as they dine on some of the hearty specialty dishes of the region.
In one small piazza, you can find tables of old books, postcards dating back 50 years or more, children’s toys, fur coats, and lampshades. Every side-street seems to house even more stalls. Beds and chairs, full dining sets, sideboards, hat stands, everything including old marble kitchen sinks!
Via del Corso, a large sloping street running through the centre of the town, is dissected by stall tables lined with jewellery, candied nuts, unusual cutlery that dates back centuries, ceramics and blown glass, vases and plates, candelabras, vintage hats and handbags and a range of amazing books! In stark contrast, some of the actual stores that line this street are high-end fashion, sleek black shop fronts encasing clothes paraded on catwalks this very season. Next door is a framer, whose store window is jammed with empty gilded picture frames, just waiting for the next Michelangelo or Piero della Francesca to pass by, just as these men did centuries ago.
It is here in Arezzo where one can touch the past, and even buy a piece of it, surrounded by the lively, beautiful and fashionable present!
Arezzo is just 75 kilometres (45 miles) from the centre of Florence, in the south of Tuscany. Arezzo’s antique fair is held on the first weekend of the month. The town itself is just half an hour from the city of Florence, and is on the direct train route connecting Florence to Rome.
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