Kitayama Craft Garden

With no more than 50 stalls, this is one of the smallest markets in Kyoto dedicated to handicrafts. You can find jewellery and accessories, clothing, woodwork and pottery, and there are always booths selling baked goods, sweets, or tsukudani.

The sellers are often a mixed crowd: Established craftspeople offer perfectly executed goods, while young art students are looking for buyers interested in their latest projects.

What they all have in common is the love for their work and the willingness to talk about their creative process.

Other than the name suggests, the Garden of Fine Arts is an outdoors gallery dedicated to large-scale reproductions of world-famous paintings. Eight pieces of art, among them Monet's Water Lilies: Morning, Leonardo's Last Supper, and Michelangelo's Last Judgement, have been reproduced on ceramic tiles in (near) original size.

The gallery was created in 1994 by Tadao Ando with his signature concrete slabs and pillars. It has three "floors" underground and thanks to its open spaces, the art can be viewed from different vantage points. The sound of running water flowing along walls and into shallow pools echoes through the gallery.

See the website of the Garden of Fine Arts Kyoto (in Japanese) for more information. Entrance fee is waived on the days of the Kitayama Craft Garden.