There are plenty of people who will tell you that the best way to see a new city is to visit its local restaurants, or maybe do a walking tour of its monuments and parks. Those suggestions are fine, but over the last couple of years, I’ve been shopping in second-hand shops, antique stores, and flea markets around the world, and am here to tell you it’s the most underrated way to experience a new city.
I recently enjoyed a week or so in Greece, with some time in both Athens and Crete, and when I was in Athens, came across a little town square filled with antique dealers, tables spilling out into the square. After perusing some shops filled with the kind of baroque couches your schoolmate’s nonna would wrap in plastic, I made my way back out to the tables — each covered with a random assortment of crockery, rusty coins and dusty art prints.
Amid the loosely themed chaos, I spotted the glint of refracting red glass and I picked up a large geometric ashtray. A deal was done for €40, I walked to dinner with my newspaper-wrapped prize tucked under my arm and today, I look at this bit of old glass on my coffee table every day (yes, every day) with a smile on my face. Antique hunting is the best way to see a city.
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There are a couple of reasons for this, but let’s start with the most important one: almost all souvenirs made to be souvenirs are trash. Literally. Most souvenirs are mass-produced, overpriced garbage that’s designed to catch your eye, but will almost certainly leave you wondering why on earth you opened your wallet for it.
But just because this is true, doesn’t mean you don’t want to return home without a trinket or token that’ll remind you of the time you went to Istanbul, New York, or wherever it was. The things you buy on your travels are time capsules and memory aids, reminding you the world is bigger and more exciting than your quotidian routine. And if you’re having a rough one, a reminder that things will improve.
No matter how dull my day might be, there’s a certain time of day when the sunlight streams into my living room and hits my bit of Greek glass (well, actually Italian, but more on that in a second). Red and yellow-tinged rainbows are scattered over the table, provoking a whiplash-inducing double take as your eye catches the spectacle.
Another reason why hunting through bins of old stuff, and scouring tables of random nicknacks is great is the picture that you start to form of the culture around you. What is considered valuable? What are the things you’ve never seen before, but are everywhere? How does the shop owner interact with you? What kinds of people are shopping around you? It’s a slice of everyday life, which if you’re travelling as a tourist, can genuinely be hard to find as you jaunt from historical monument to art gallery.
After finding my red and yellow ashtray in Athens, I found its younger sibling in another antique store in Crete. Clearly, no one local was particularly interested in this sort of thing, and I bought it from the chatty shop owner for €30, along with a trio of vintage hotel Campari bottles (from when they still used crushed cochineal insects to dye it red).
International antique hunting also gives you the chance to own something that you might not be able to afford otherwise. As it turned out, my two pieces of glass were from Murano, Italy, around the 1960s or 70s and likely made by Flavio Poli For Seguso. A similar example of the red one is currently selling for £348 (AU$668), while the black version is up for £339 (AU$651), both prices I would never pay for a reminder of Greece.
No matter how interested you are in glass, you’ve got to admit that when it comes to the space you spend much of your life in, it’s the details that make a house a home. Those details should have memories attached to them, and if those memories are of exploring a new corner of the world — that’s about as good as it gets.
