Quality, Variety, Novelty, and Originality Have been the Distinctive Features that Have Characterized Sitges’ Commerce.
Commerce in general, shops, and commercial establishments are one of the basic pillars in the current economy and in the external image of a first-rate tourist town like Sitges. Quality, variety, novelty, and originality have been the distinctive features that have characterized Sitges’ commerce, a commercial model that has preserved the traces of a traditional character while adapting to modern times. Modern art and ancient art have coexisted in a fragile balance in the Sitges of our grandparents and in today’s Sitges.
If we focus on the art trade, on the antiques market, along with the trade of second-hand dealers and that aimed at collectors of rare and unique objects, or those of numismatics and philately, we can verify that historically in Sitges, this area has been one of the strategic sectors, fundamental to its identity as a cultural and artistic town.
First Santiago Rusiñol and then the American Charles Deering, but also many other collectors like Doctor Pérez Rosales and contemporary artists such as Miguel Condé, Pere Stämpfli, or Manuel Blesa, have made Sitges a benchmark in the arts and consequently in antiques and collecting. The renewal and modernization of a sector as traditional as that of arts and antiques has not overcome successive crises; currently, we are witnessing the decline and closure of establishments that lent an old-world charm and authenticity to the Sitges Ribera. Llorenç is the last of the Sitges antique dealers who has been forced to close his characteristic “Cau Ferrat” located on the ground floor of Can Falç, on the corner with Carreta Street. The barred windows now remain papered over and empty.
This permanent crisis in the arts and antiques sector, the erratic seasonality of tourism, and the unhealthy dependence on circumstantial factors were faithfully represented by the artist Josep Maria Rosselló in the panel that can still be seen today on the party wall of the Pizzeria del Cap de la Vila, where the figure of the Sitges sailor, wearing one shoe and one espadrille, carries on his shoulder the white siren, who has become the personification of Blanca Subur. This is a version of the mythical Rape of Europa transposed to our contemporaneity, even though the panel is already over forty years old. Symbolically, Rosselló portrayed this idea of a chimerical, white, and beautiful Sitges abducted by Diego Ruiz, a philosopher-doctor, one of those singular characters who built the imaginary of a white Sitges refuge.
Times change, but the essence remains: the recent discovery of the Roman-era gold ring in Racó de la Calma, the underwater explorations of shipwrecks off Estanyol beach, the restoration of the Baulard cannon, and many other heritage elements transport us back in time, making Sitges this magical place where modernity and ancient times shake hands in a present that seeks to preserve what still remains.
The art trade, the antiques market, and collecting refer us to this submerged world that we can discover if we clean our glasses with the fantastic elixir that Fernanda Krahn-Uribe proposes in her story “El limpiagafas cuàntico,” published by Siruela. An amusing vision of a Sitges that is both modern and ancient.
Source: http://www.eixdiari.cat/opinio/doc/55778/el-comerc-de-lart-a-sitges-un-sector-estrategic.html
