Market Day

“I’m gonna be round my vegetables; I’m gonna chow down my vegetables…”

- The Beach Boys, Vegetables

Today being Saturday, it was Market Day.   We headed out to the street at about 11 AM; I think next week we should go a bit earlier - and we should take a shopping list with us.

The market was actually a little more crowded that these pictures would have you believe.  I took these towards the end of our shopping time as I didn’t want to creep out our new neighbors by snapping tons of pictures of them.  Still, it wasn’t hugely busy at 11 AM.

I was expecting that it would be mostly fruits and vegetables and other foods; while there were plenty of those, there was so much more.  There were tables and racks of clothes (everything from underwear and socks to hats and coats; I even saw what looked like some kind of faux-leather pants that come in a small box).  There were shoes, accessories, sheets and blankets, household goods, cleaning products, personal hygiene items, kitchen tools -  a real hodge-podge of items.

I noticed that there were no stalls or trucks selling meats or cheeses, though, which I’d been hoping for.  We saw one vendor selling a variety of food items who had several frozen fish on offer; but we decided to forego that in favor of checking out the pescheria when it’s open.

We stopped at several vendors to purchase some fruits and vegetables; the first seller we stopped at gave us a bunch of grapes (uva) to munch on while we made our selection!  They were tasty, too; sweet but not too sweet - although they did have seeds.  I bought a huge bunch of them in spite of the seeds, along with several other items.  We ended up with grapes, some zucchini (zucchine), an eggplant (melanzana), tomatoes (pomodori), oyster mushrooms (cardoncelli), onions (cipolle), and bell peppers (peperoni).  Just as we were finishing up our exploration of the various market tables, a van entered the street selling fresh bread (pane) - and I do mean fresh, as the enormous, crusty loaf we purchased was still a little warm in my hands as I carried it home.  It smelled soooo good!

And all this good, fresh, locally produced food was had for a grand total of €6.  

Yes, you read that right:  €6 (less than $7 US).  I would have spent about three times that at home, I think.  The loaf of bread was…wait for it……..€0,80.  Eighty euro cents.  I don’t know whether the guy charged us the wrong price, or things are just sold more cheaply at the weekly street market, or maybe he just liked the way we looked, or whatever. 

Needless to say, we had a very nice pranzo today:  I cooked up some onion, half a red pepper we already had in the fridge, a zucchini, and a little garlic in a frying pan, then added some leftover tomato and basil sauce to the pan and served this over pasta, along with slices of the fresh bread.