CLOSED NOW. But I’m keeping the post up.

Fancy a few Renaissance magic supplies?

No?

What if they were free? I thought so.

Here are a few things I picked up in Florence that I thought I might share.

Yes, I got back a few weeks ago but it seemed that for the whole month of October the entire magical internet came down with a big case of the Oprahs because there was free crap flying every which way. And I didn’t want mine to get lost in the crowd. (I’m not selfish, I just know a bit about marketing.)

So now I’ll tell you a little bit about what’s contained in the giveaway.

The loot

A Home Protection Kit

Purchased at the Basilica di Santa Croce. This place had an amazing energy. It’s also the burial place of Galileo, Dante and Michaelangelo. You can see their tombs in the slideshow. I was on video duty that day so I can’t be blamed for the fact that I have no exterior shots of this impressive building.

The kit contains a wooden crucifix with an image of St Francis and a prayer card with the home blessing written on the back. Think of it as an excuse to practice your Italian. (I have read it aloud to myself through the packaging and I sound really racist. My Italian is just awful.)

A Magic Potion

Seriously. This is a bottle of the famed Acqua di Santa Maria Novella.

Made for centuries by apothecaries attached to my favourite Florentine church, it was renowned throughout Europe for it’s restorative properties.

Think of it as an all purpose energy drink for the soul.

(I bought myself a bottle. Note to winner: Contains alcohol. Would like to know your cocktail suggestions.)

The apothecary itself was amazing. Baroque room after delicious-smelling baroque room. While we were there, some clearly very wealthy Italian women with little dogs came in and sank hundreds of Euros on some specially prepared concoctions.

This is the real deal, folks.

A St Michael Prayer Card In Folder

Okay, so this wasn’t from Florence. This is actually donated by my mother who joined us in the city having just arrived from Assisi where she was visiting St Francis’s cave. So it’s got a lot of magic juice on it, but not strictly Florentine magic juice. It’s got Assisi juice.

A Sibilla Oracle Deck

I have mentioned these before -as has Jason. I’m now the proud owner of three different versions.

They rock.

Florence has a long history of printing and one of the decks I bought was individually printed in a store around the corner from my apartment and limited to a run of 100. I adore it.

The prize doesn’t contain one of those decks because they are extremely expensive.

Nevertheless, you’re getting an Italian card set from very near the home of European cartomancy. It was actually created a bit further north but was extremely popular in Florence during the Renaissance. As was anything to do with magic. Hence the giveaway.

How to enter

Easy. Just subscribe by the end of the weekend.

Either by email or RSS. There is no need to comment or do anything else. My thinking behind this is twofold:

• If you already subscribe then I love you long time and you definitely deserve some free shit.
• I’m lazy. It’s much easier for me to export all your email addresses from feedburner into excel and have it randomly select one. (This does mean you need to subscribe with an email address you actually check.)

UPDATE: Once this is done, you need to check at the bottom of a post in your feed for a call to action. There will be a link and you’ll need to clickety click it. The link will remain at the bottom of every post until the competition closes.

Second chance to win

There’s going to be a promoter’s prize as well.

• Anyone who tweets about it (you’ll need to @ me or send me the link to your tweet or paste the link in a comment below)
• Anyone who posts about it and links to this page

Will get a tarot card bag that Geraldine helped me select (she picked the one she liked) at the famous Atlantis Bookstore in London and -I’m quite excited by this last one- a copy of Black Swan.

Obviously this is going to be a much smaller group so… you know… your odds are better. If you blog and tweet (and you should) then you get two entries.

I can’t track the ‘facebook likes’ with this plugin but please do anyway.

The fine print

• Prize will be drawn at 10pm GMT on Sunday November 7th.
• Winner will be determined by randomly selecting a cell with your email address in Excel. So send your spells to Microsoft, not me!
• Winner will have 48 hours to respond via email with postal address, etc or the prize will be redrawn.
• I’ll ship anywhere that Royal Mail lets me ship. So if you live in the mountains of northern Pakistan or on an oil rig then be nice and send it to your sister’s place.
• For the promoter’s prize, I seriously don’t care how many followers you have or how big your blog is. I’m trying to measure engagement here, not reach. Also, as well all know, size doesn’t matter except where penises are concerned. Just don’t take the piss and start up a bunch of accounts solely to enter. Of course, if you’re doing that I might politely suggest you need to speak to someone about your gambling problem.
• The promoter’s prize will be drawn in a similar random fashion except I will have manually entered your names into Excel. I’m not happy about it, either.