Now we turn our attention to how we might furnish the house. We had asked Kevin for some ideas of places to go, both to find some older pieces and some new things.
He suggested a couple of options: Maison du Monde for new things and Smile for some older things we might salvage and reuse.
I had visited Maison du Monde on my last trip. I remembered it as a store like HomeGoods in the US. As we visited, I realized I had overrated it. It was more like a World Market, where the quality wasn’t very high. We crossed this off our list.
Next, on to Smile, thinking that maybe we can find that old piece of furniture to use as a ground floor bathroom vanity. On the way, we looked for local antique or used furniture stores online. We didn’t discover any. but we did learn from some articles and forum questions and answers that used furniture may be hard to find in Italy. It seems that most Italians just keep furniture in the family until they decide it’s best used as firewood. This is likely to change with millennials, who seem to want only new things.
An Update
After we returned home and did more searching, we did locate a few antique furniture markets held in towns. There’s one in Ascoli Piceno the last weekend of some months and a few other scattered about.
Click image to enlarge
Turning off the main road, surrounded by industrial buildings, we arrive at Smile, which is a junkyard. Crap everywhere inside and out. We took a quick look-see, just in case an interesting old item might be hiding among the old vases, magazines, and pictures. We saw nothing right away and it was too exhausting to even think of digging around. It was closing time, anyway, so it was time to go.
Down 0-2, we figured we should at least get a feel for IKEA. So the next morning we drove toward Ancona and the region’s IKEA for a Saturday morning visit.
I hadn’t been in an IKEA in many years, but it’s still pretty much the same. The setup leads you through the whole store. We did see some items that might work as furniture. Plus, it’s certainly the place to go for housewares.
Toward the end of our journey, we stopped in the cafeteria for Swedish meatballs. It was good to have a little change from Italian food. A few hundred meters more of snaking through kitchen items, we emerged to set off for Ancona and our hotel.
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