Cristina Buccellato holds a meter stick wall to wall in Europe's smallest store, U` Pirtusu, near Palermo's Quattro Canti, the city center
Cristina Buccellatto, a jewelry maker, runs Europe's smallest store, a hole in the wall next to the Hotel Centrale just a few steps from the Quattro Canti, the intersection at the center of Old Palermo. The store is just over one meter wide and three meters deep. The name of the store is " U Pirtusu", Sicilian for the Hole. Her partner Tomas Eni, also a jewlery designer and maker, helps run the store. Now it is an exposition site for the members of a non-profit artists' and artisans' non-profit organization, ALAB. Its former owner was a 90-year-old woman who fixed watches and installed batteries in them for her whole life in that small space. Cristina told me that the store is the third-smallest in the world, according to a Giornale Di Sicilia newspaper report.