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I usually wouldn’t find myself wandering an antique mall of my own volition, but I will confess that I don’t fight the opportunity when asked. I especially like the ones where there are booths with absentee owners, where you take your purchase up to a central cashier. The pressure to browse is nonexistent, and I get to imagine what kind of person would spend time and money collecting late Victorian piss pots and then decide other people would want to buy them. (If I’ve just described you, well, I’m sure it’s a fulfilling hobby.) Anyway, I tend to look at the old books on sale, hoping for some pristine gem, but people tend to take better care of old Brady Bunch lunch boxes than first edition Steinbeck’s twice that age.

This is not to say I haven’t made purchases. One of my favorites is a pretty black and white 19th century etching reproduction of the Duomo in Florence, Italy. I had been wondering if I wanted it when I saw the owner had labeled it “A Scene in Paris.” That clinched the deal, and it currently hangs in my office at work.

My last find was a wonderfully sentimental one. I spent a few years in Rome growing up, and my parent’s favorite restaurant was Sabatini in the Trastevere section which hugs the Tiber river on the southwestern side of the Eternal City. It’s a cozy refuge from the noise of Rome, filled with family-owned pizzerias and art shops, and with streets too narrow for cars, making it a pedestrian’s dream. There is only space for one small piazza, and on one end of this cobbled idyll resides Sabatini. Whenever we had visitor’s from the States, we always took them there for dinner. On my last visit to Rome, I strolled through Trastevere and Sabatini is still there, vibrant as ever.

In those days, dining and smoking went hand in hand, and many European restaurants placed colorful ceramic glazed ashtrays on the tables with the establishment’s name and address on it. Patrons were welcome to take them home, much in the way we swipe pens from hotels today and unwittingly advertise for them. Sabatini also had elegant terra cotta water pitchers on each table emblazoned with the restaurant’s vital statistics. My mom always loved them, but they must have been for sale, because I don’t remember one ever displayed at home. Or maybe they were too big for her to stuff into her purse when the waiter wasn’t looking.

Regardless, in Prairie Village, KS recently I was walking through an antique mall and looked into a booth with a fair amount of dusty old books. I stepped in and noticed that, being used as a bookend, was a Sabatini water pitcher. I don’t remember what is cost, but it wasn’t much. I would have paid anything within a country mile of reasonable for it. I keep it in my own bookcase now. It’s just a simple, mass produced hunk of ceramic, but I can’t look at it without remembering how much my mom looked forward to an evening at Sabatini. I guess that’s the whole allure of rummaging through an antique mall. You just never know…