“Can I go with you?” or “I’ll carry your bags” is a refrain I often hear when someone learns I’m going to Italy for work. Traveling to Italy to buy terracotta pottery for our store sounds like a pretty good job, and it is when you don’t have to do it every other month.  It’s not that I don’t love the time in Italy, but it takes a day to get there and a day to get back.  Remember, I’m not flying on Air Force One, I’m flying coach.

I don’t have a bag for you to carry because I’ve figured out how to travel in Europe for a month or more with just the bag on my back. I take the same train, rent the same car, eat at—well here is where it can get interesting—after a long day going from terracotta pottery factory to terracotta pottery factory, I usually can find a great place to dine and a gelato shop with an excellent scoop. This is a consolation to twenty years of hanging out in terracotta factories and spending the rest of the time driving, don’t you think?

I am usually traveling in the winter, but this time I had (yes that’s “had”) to go in April. Spring had really sprung and Tuscany was in full bloom, trees had leaves and people were not in big fat coats. I wore a T-shirt every day. What a difference a few months can make.

Another difference was that on this trip, I didn’t go to buy terracotta pots, I went to buy garden antiques. I’ve been trying for three years to get this old guy to sell his collection of old, very old farm troughs, stones, millstones and wagons. I spent three days loading two containers and then two more days visiting manufacturers, back to Rome, back on the plane (in coach) and back to work selling pottery.

Somebody has to do it!

Antique Spanish Oil Jars

I get a call from Brent at Eye of the Day.  He’s stuck in traffic on the 405 freeway in L.A., and he could use a little help unloading a container that’s just arrived at the Port of Los Angeles. I get up from the potters wheel, wrap my clay in plastic and head to Carpinteria not knowing what to expect.

Typically, Eye of the Day containers are from Greece, Italy or France  and are packed to the gills, having made the arduous journey from the Mediterranean. I know from experience that shipping ceramics in any capacity can be precarious at best, so you never know what to expect when you finally open the door.  On this particular day I figured it was more of the same, the usual three-to-four-hour marathon of unloading fragile, heavy, awkward, authentic terra cotta. I was both right and wrong. To my great surprise, the container comes from Spain. Oh man, this is gonna be awesome!

When Juan cracks open the door ever so slowly, so as not to lose anything that may have shifted in transport, it is clear that this is perhaps a once in a lifetime experience. Before me lies the mother lode of antique Spanish oil jars, richly textured, impeccably handmade, and well worn from years of use. Some are stitched up with metal staples, some seemingly have bee’s wax in them, some look as if they were glazed by the hand of a two-year old, and almost all of them have some measure of olive oil still inside!

Each pot is a masterpiece. It’s as if each and every piece has its own unique story of function colliding with inherent beauty.  These oil jars are museum quality, some of the most fantastic pieces of pottery I will ever see in my life. Yours too, when you make the trip to Eye of the Day to catch a glimpse of these Spanish beauties before they are all sold!