I live near a suburb called Leichhardt, which is also known as Little Italy. It has a main street lined with cafés and restaurants, and people meet up with their friends and family, parties of people in pretty dresses and suits converge, others casually walk along, chic in designer jeans and designer sunglasses, and designer dogs in tow.

In the entrance laneway that leads down to the Forum (which I am told is designed to the same slightly off kilter angles as the actual Forum... having not been to Italy, I can't verify that)... anyway, in that laneway there is a small shop called The Merchant of Venice. I occassionally drink long black coffee and eat rich chocolate cake in the café opposite this small shop. I like sitting opposite this shop. It is a shop of masks. Beautiful Venetian masks. There is something both frivolous yet satisfying (for me) about a shop that creates beatiful things simply for their beauty.

Steel blue walls contrast the creamy faces, gilded and sparkling. People pause and look into the shop window, pointing out the masks. They are faces out of time. Out of place. Out of history. And it isn't a history known by us. It's a history of Venice and Carnivalé. Most of us wouldn't know the names of the faces we see on the walls, faces which would have been instantly recognisable to Venetians of the era. Yet people walking by are still drawn to the window. Is it perhaps because of the individuality of each of the pieces, standing out in an era of mass production? Feathers, sparkles, gilded faces, suns, moons, hearts and cherubs, sneers and winks and hooked noses. Tri-hats with bells and puss-in-boots. The fantasy of our romantic childhood catches the eye and draws out the child within to coo in wonder.

This little shop won't dress you for success. It won't offer you handbags with which to define yourself. It won't make your life easier and more productive with its personal organisers and mobile phone deals. It is not even likely it will be an investment to be profited from fiscally.

What is this little shop then? It's a shop of imagination and naivety, even as it displays wares that historically were the devices of letchery and decadance. It steps us outside the world of crushing consumerism and exhausting acquisition... for just a moment to stop and restore the soul of the child.

Of course, for those who are captured by the window, there are also those who don't even give it a second glance. I wonder what that exposes about them.

A mother, pushing a pram, coos to her young daughter, dark-eyed and maybe four years old. "Look at all the lovely masks!", but as they walk on, the child's eyes do not leave my plate with its dark rich chocolate and whipped cream.

"Can we have an icecream?" she asks her mother, and only the small girl and I will know where the inspiration for the request came from.