Silk Scarves

With the Euro higher than the dollar, there are few bargains in Italy this summer.  One of the more affordable luxuries were these scarves, available from street vendors in all the major cities.  They are a 50/50 blend of Italian silk and polyester in lots of beautiful colors.  Some had lace trim, some had small flowers embroidered on them.   They were a steal at 5 Euro apiece (about $7.00).  One vendor sold me five for 20 Euro (about $29).    I wish I had bought more.



At the high end, were these silk and cashmere scarves for 40 Euro (about $60).  In the town of Bellagio on Lake Como, you climb up the hill to a shop called Azalea, which has beautiful silk scarves, ties and more. They will even give you a lesson in how silk is made and let you hold a silk cocoon.

Leather

In Florence, our guide Valentino, advised us to avoid any leather store with David or Michelangelo in their name. For true designer leather, she recommended we visit her friend Jennifer Tattanelli who has a shop across from the Palazzo Pitti.   We crossed the Ponte Vecchio, bypassing all the gold shops, and found Jennifer's store, Casini Firenze, at #30 Piazza Pitti, filled with beautiful leather clothing, shoes and accessories.

All of Jennifer's unique designs are made of the finest Italian leather.  I splurged on one of her specialities:  a hand stitched jacket that is reversible from leather to suede while my sisters shopped for exquisite bags and accessories.  Jennifer's website at  www.casinifirenze.it  doesn't really do justice to the feast of beautiful things we found in her store, including the section of discounted samples and items from previous seasons.   And, Jennifer and her helpful staff cheerfully completed the VAT refund forms for us, while giving us other shopping and dining tips.  

In Rome, we found lots of affordable leather bags in the small shops in the alleys behind the designer stores around the Spanish Steps. Styles like this can be found for around  $30- 40 Euro each ($45 -  $60) in a wide variety of colors.    I wish I had bought at least one in orange or red.

Spices

We saw these spice jars in a few different places, but no one place had a great selection.  My sister Jane managed to accumulate a nice variety -- oregano, rosemary, garlic -- but I only got the hot pepper shown here.  It was the only one with a shaker handle.


Below is the window of a spice store in Venice.  Note how beautifully the sculpted the piles of spices.

Sweets

Italians seem to love fruit flavored hard candies and we saw small boxes of Leone Pastilles displayed at nearly every  checkout counter.   Although the boxes are pretty, I'm not a fan of the candy inside.

Instead, I shopped for the other Italian passion:  licorice.  No Twizzlers or Red Vines:  Italians like black licorice and produce it in an amazing variety from tiny pellets to small discs, plain or candy coated.  There was an incredible selection at Castroni on the Via Nationale across from the Pallazo delle Esponsizioni, where I found these tins.  The blue Sassolini tin had large candy coated nuggets, like marble stones.  The white Bianconeri tin contains small licorice mints.  The red Amarelli tin contained plain black licorice so bitter that we threw it out.  They also had candies in bulk.

There are so many beautiful pastries and cakes in Italy that you wonder how the Italians stay so thin.  In Sienna, we bought these dense, decadent cakes loaded with dried fruits and chocolate.    Inside the shiny paper wrapping each sugar dusted cake is vacuum sealed in a foil pouch.  Yum.

Finally, on the way home, we hit the duty free store at Heathrow for jumbo sized assortments of our favorite chocolates:  Cadbury (English), Lindt (Swiss) and Kinder(German).  If there is Italian chocolate, we didn't find any.  But there is an incredible Lindt store in Florence, right across from the Duomo.

Best Souvenir

If you go to see the ruins in Rome, buy this book.  It has pictures of all major sites -- the Colosseum, the  Forum, the house of the Vestal Virgins, etc. with overlays that show what these areas looked like in ancient Rome.  Street vendors in front of the Colosseum were charging 25 Euro for the book, but you can buy it in a bookshop downtown for half that.  There are several versions -- some are bigger and the better ones have transparent overlays.  All versions seem to come with multi-lingual DVDs.

Have this book with you when you go to see the Roman ruins.  You won't be sorry.

Worst Souvenir

When you think Italy, you think pasta, right?  We saw bags of pasta in lots of gift shops -- most of it brightly colored, flavored (spinach,salmon, squid, etc) or even striped.  But in Italian supermarkets, the shelves were filled with the same Barilla pasta we buy here in Safeway.

The other thing you saw everywhere was pictures of the David.  Mostly not  the whole David, just his crotch.  You could get David's private parts on aprons, boxer shorts, T-shirts, and more.

So my pick for the worst souvenir of Italy combines these two trends --David pasta.  Look closely.  Good appetite.