SHOPPING - Piemonte Feel

• Where to explore

“That’s much better than Portobello Road!... Or the Paris Flea Market.” This is what Sheila, a blonde-haired woman, called out to Bonetto, an Italian man eight inches shorter than her who happened to be an expert in American studies.

This line was enough to give an exact image of one of Turin’s city institutions, the Balon antique bazaar. Sheila and Bonetto are characters in the most famous of Fruttero and Lucentini’s novels, La donna della domenica, which was adapted into a film by Luigi Comencini. Marcello Mastroianni plays the role of police commissioner Santamaria and Jacqueline Bisset that of “the Sunday woman,” a seductive upper-class woman from Turin. It is a comic, refined, and irreverent mystery story set in Turin that paints a merciless picture of it. By the late 1800s Piedmont’s junk dealers got together every Saturday behind Porta Palazzo. In the 1950s they were joined by the newly arrived southern Italian immigrants. Now people from all continents have joined the earlier groups and the Balon has become a real melting pot with Piedmont sauce. The bazaars outside of Turin are less lively but more specialized, including those in Cherasco, Alessandria, Vercelli (called L’Barlafus), Casale and Nizza Monferrato. Almost all of these are dedicated to antiques and the sale of furniture and knickknacks from the farm houses of Piedmont. Collectors looking for weird things should go to Santhià, the so-called “temple” of strange collecting, the only place where someone can find complete sets of Smurfs displayed or surprise toys from the insides of chocolate eggs.