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A brief summary of my life: I was born in Florence. When I moved to Milan, after having spent a few years in Rome working in the film industry, I chose a job through which I could use and develop the potential that my Art studies had offered me, and what better place than a city so rich with treasures of every type and period.
I chose to do this furthering my knowledge of Art.
In the first years of activity I met antique dealers like Tullio Silva, Fabrizio Apolloni and Gianfranco Mazzoleni who all helped me. Tullio Silva said to me "specialise yourself". Apolloni and Mazzoleni, once I had made my choice of specialising in antique silverware, taught me a lot about that particular field of work. It was in those years that I became a qualified expert for the Chamber of Commerce and the Law Courts of Milan.
I moved from my first shop in Corso Europa 16, located in a beautiful seventeenth century courtyard, to Via Santo Spirito from which I still work today.
In 1975, I had the chance to organise an exhibition of Board Games in my gallery. The proposal came from two young friends who decided to take advantage of the creativity of the father of one of them, the Architect Mario Fois.
Fois thought the games up and planned how to make them with whatever he could find, then, in a little carpentry at Caprino Bergamasco, Luca and Leonardo would produce them.
I was fascinated by the different handcrafted woods used for reproducing the most remote of man's creations in the field of games.
That's where I got my idea from: to collect the prototypes: travelling.
But if travelling was considered a means of study before the development of tourism took place, and it's fruits ornaments of the mind and the formation of the ability to judge, today, with internet, travelling is accessible to everyone.
It is possible to approach who and what we want, in a very simple way, clicking on key words, following fascinating itineraries that we can return to as many times as we like.
Journeys like this can be repeated continually and together with the descriptions provided, often with some minute details, it is possible to learn to choose antiques.
And this is the website where you can do just that, navigating through silverware, games, furniture, engravings, paintings, and much more.
Antonella Bensi
In the gallery "... antique silverware: 104 pieces from an embossed plaque and a vermeille frame that represents one of the stages of the "via crucis", both late seventeenth century, to a dèco jug.
The number of games remains more or less the same, I buy and sell, but they don't always have the same contents.
Now, with the geese, yellow dwarfs, assalti al castello, chess, chessboards, dice throwers, dice, mah jongg, I have 126 pieces.
And then furniture, pairs of armchairs and chairs ranging from '700 to dèco, bargains such as an English mahogany sideboard with flap from the beginning of '800 that I'm selling, to promote my site, at Euro 3.500.
Drawings, engravings, prints, (jewellery: shortly ...)
Travel, travel and, who knows, we may speak, soon.
For interested people, such as dealers or privates that want to sell, their objects' presence is guaranteed on the site. Once sold the lot, a professional commission will be asked.
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