"Even if you hate antiques, it’s impossible to dislike the monthly antique fair in Arezzo. Long ago, when I was climbing through wooden skeletons of houses on the outskirts of San Antonio. Playing hide and seek in pretty dangerous places went par for the course. During the days when ‘go play outside’ was obligatory in a young person’s childhood, I use to scoff at anyone who used old stuff to decorate their homes. In Texas, the shabby chic theme we see so much today has always been in style. Maybe it’s the access to really rusty things, or wooden objects that would so comfortably fit an Texas flag. I just wasn’t into any of it. I vowed that one day I would leave Texas and live a glamorous life in NYC, going to parties and holding the stems of my cosmopolitan glass with relative ease. And it when it came to my future house, let’s just say Barbie’s dream house had nothing on what I was going to do. I guess you could say I’m a bit of a dreamer, until I got off my ass and decide the doer part was pretty necessary too.
Now, almost 15 year’s later I find myself cooing at anything even slightly rustic. Italy has a way of making you appreciate relics of the past, well except the ones glorifying Mussolini. While I far from anything even slightly resembling a housewife, I do have ideas on how I want our home to look at it often includes a few, poignant pieces. Sort of like the antique pharmacy drawers you can find in one of my favorite artisan perfumery shops in Florence, the seductive Aqua Flor. So off we were, one Saturday morning, Nico, our friend Nancy in tow, to the town of Arezzo in Tuscany to check out the antique fair. This is embarrassing to admit, but I’ve never actually visited this famous town that lies only an hour from Florence, surrounded by four valleys. (...) My advice is to come during the first Sunday of every month (and the previous Saturday), when the antique fair takes place. This is the biggest antique fair in Italy, dating back to 1968 and it is seriously cool. With over 500 sellers, around 20,000 visitors crowd Arezzo to haggle over the goods or simply just to soak in the atmosphere in the areas surrounding Corso Italia, Piazza San Francesco, Piazza Grande and the Logge del Vasari. I didn’t have overtly high expectations on actually buying anything but what I found was that this town was exactly what we needed. A break from Florence, all in order to embrace a little small town Tuscan life."
- Girl in Florence