FORGET CORONA! LET’S GO TO CORTONA!

Every Fall since 1962, the town of Cortona has hosted a national antiques show.  This year was no exception, although the 58^th edition was exceptional in its obeisance to the rules of the coronavirus.  It seemed smaller than in prior years, but that may be because it was held in the convention center of Sant’Agostino, a completely renovated mid-13^th century church and cloister, in order to spread out the vendors and their wares into the small cells surrounding the courtyard and its well (below). 

Here’s how the official site Cortonantiquaria described the event (translated into anguished English by Google):

Cortona, Cortona Antiquaria is back: the first artistic event in post-Covid Tuscany.
All the news of the 58th edition of the most awaited event by lovers of art collecting.

Cortonantiquaria returns from 15 to 30 August 2020, the oldest antiques exhibition in Italy this year reaches its fifty-eighth edition. The venue will no longer be in the historic Palazzo Vagnotti, but in the more spacious Sant'Agostino Convention Center, in via Guelfa, in the historic center of Cortona: the initiative will be hosted in the historic premises of the Convent, with an adjoining church, in a truly evocative and completely restored.  [This is the sentence equivalent of a hanging chad.]

We’re not in the market to buy anything, but we are voyeurs of beauty, so we decided to have a look after lunch.

A hand sanitizer station was positioned at the entrance to the former church; masks were required (and actually worn!); and a young woman beamed us aboard with a digital thermometer.  Passing muster, we passed by a pomegranate tree and into the storied past told by the treasures on exhibition.  

This photo essay will give you a taste of some of what we saw.

16th c. Adamo and Eva, School of Albrecht Dürer

Hand painted 18th c. Neapolitan (?) screens on wood

17th c. Flemish tapestry in wool (yours for only €80.000,00!)

18th c. hand painted and gilded iron bed frame

Head of Medusa in black amber, antiquity

Carved limestone figure, antiquity

19th c. (?) hand painted coffee service,unique

Child's hobby horse with Indian drawing bow and arrow on Conestoga wagon

Horn-shaped drinking cup carved in stone with horse head motif

Incised cow scapula (don't ask!)

19th c. patchwork malachite caviar server in the style of Faberge'

19th c. (?) marquetry matched veneer chest of drawers with bronze hardware

16th c. (?) Northern European, Christ (as Salvator Mundi?)

Virgin of Guadalupe, 20th c. Mexican artist

20th c.battle scene, tempera on wood

Glad to have squeezed in on the last afternoon of the last day of the show, we left the distant past and walked down Via Nazionale

to the small piazza at the edge of the Etruscan town walls, overlooking Lago Trasimeno, made famous by Frances Mayes’ Under the Tuscan Sun.   

We reminisced about the recent past and our first visit to Cortona 23 years ago.  This little corner of Tuscany was our home for a while—five years—and it felt especially good to be back on a lazy Sunday afternoon once again, far from the madding (and maddening) crowd.

Keep it real!  Be Italian and wear your damn mask!

Marilyn