One of the stranger shopping experiences Rome offers is a visit to Mitsukoshi Roma, the ‘local’ branch of the upscale Japanese department store.
Mitsukoshi is a cultural frontier outpost the likes of which i’ve never before seen: a full, multi-level department store catering solely to Japanese tourists. Every price is in Yen, every product listed in kanji, and every floor swarming with impeccably-uniformed Japanese salespeople.
The big kicker is that they don’t sell anything Japanese, nope, nothing so fun. Vended instead is a dull and clichéd assortiment of ‘Italian’ goods. (Think heavily-branded Gucci, Prada, Armani, and Diesel items, plus little gift-sized packs of olive oil.) The entire store, you see, is designed for package-tour tourists wanting to snap up souvenir goods and gifts, but unwilling or unable to navigate the shopping experience in Rome proper.
The most delightfully bizarre aspect of Mitsukoshi is the purgatorial waiting room in the basement, near the bus garage, I suspect. It’s been done up in a sort of Mediterranean-meets-Sanrio motif, with a large and colorful paper-maiche apple tree in the center, featuring a built-in bench seating a dozen bored-looking husbands, each one quietly chain-smoking while a Muzak’ed rendition of ‘Tico Tico’ plays in the background.
A slightly less surreal shopping experience awaits you at M.A.S. (Mas Allo Statuto), not a kilometer away from Mitsukoshi. No, the average ‘Romano Romano’ doesn’t hang out here much, either, but the budget-conscious (esp. Rome’s immigrant population) do. An unsavory amalgam of Price Club, Pic-N-Save, and a Goodwill shop, the massive M.A.S. hawks things like surplus army blankets, cheap Chinese cutlery, and amazingly unfashionable footwear by the basketful. Additionally, there’s lots of low-low-price sweatshop textiles, mostly poly/cotton blends with dubiously-licensed logos, like the Kama-Sutra-esque ‘Fruit of The Lover’ T-shirts on sale for 3 euro each.
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