Ventimiglia is a town of 27,000. There must have been 10,000 extra people in the few streets, maybe more, many of them French, and when lunchtime came the restaurants were packed. The stalls were set up along the river in four rows, each of them a quarter mile long: leather goods, cashmere sweaters, shoes, kitchen utensils, bedspreads, jewelry, tablecloths, curtains. We bought many Christmas presents. Also shoes, underwear, sweaters, jajamas and a frying pan. Everything we looked at was made in Italy, not China or elsewhere in the Orient. One whole row of stalls was given over to Italian food specialties--every kind of sausage you can imagine, and pastas and quails and wheels and wheels of parmesan, gorgonzola and other cheeses I could not name.
In this part of Italy the market moves on day by day, same goods, same merchants: Bordighera on Thursdays, Ventimiglia Fridays, San Remo Saturdays and so forth. With timeout for lunch we walked for four hours. A restaurant on the beach. A very nice Chianti. A different kind of sightseeing. A delightful day.