Mercato Trionfale

I am extremely lucky to have a wonderful market that is only a 15-minute walk from my apartment in Rome.  Christian and I stumbled across it on our first full day here.  We went for pizza at Bonci, then walked the 25 minutes back to my apartment.  Looking at Google Maps, I noticed the market labeled and decided that we should take a detour to check it out.

It’s called Mercato Trionfale, and it’s enormous.  We didn’t get lost the first day thanks to Christian’s sense of direction, but I got lost on my own almost every time that I went in the first month.  Even now I can get lost if I enter the market from my other-than-usual-side, which happened on Saturday, just a few days ago.  The guide who gave the students and I a tour of Rome on the second day of orientation said that it’s the best market in the city center: the one that some chefs go to early in the morning to get fresh produce for their restaurants.

It's open from 8am to 1:30pm, Monday through Saturday.  On the average, I go twice a week, sometimes more when I forget to make a list.  It really does have almost everything: there are 273 stalls or vendors.  Eventually, I learned to take a picture of the stall number of a place that I wanted to be able to find again.

More than half of the stalls sell fresh produce, vegetables and fruits that change with the seasons.  In September there were still lots of zucchini, tomatoes, eggplant, peaches, and apricots.  In October the mushrooms appeared, especially porcini, along with artichokes, fresh figs and the first apples.  I bought figs and brought them to class for my students: most of them had never tasted one.  In November I found chestnuts, persimmons, squashes, a lot more apples, and puntarelle – more on that last item in a later post. 

There is a fish market in the back, in a well-ventilated section slightly apart from the rest.  It’s not open on Mondays, since most fishermen don’t work on Sundays.  There are at least twenty butcher shops.  My favorite is Di Cola, where I get chicken wings almost every week to make my broth.  Sometimes I get carpaccio, very thinly sliced beef that is eaten raw with olive oil and parmesan shavings in Italy as an appetizer.  They and slice it: the butcher uses a screwdriver tapped into a wooden chopping block to hold the large piece of meat in place and an extremely sharp knife to cut thin slices.  They prepare items on demand for clients, like my carpaccio: they trim roasts, cut steaks, thinly slice a whole breast of chicken for chicken piccata, and so on.  This means that on Saturdays the wait is very long, even with four butchers working.  Many people take a number, go do their other shopping, and come back when their turn is approaching.

There are at least twenty cheese sellers, many of them combined with salumi – the Italian word for charcuterie, which is a French word that I realize may not really help. I don’t think we have a word for this category in English.  It means prepared meats and associated products: prosciutto and other salted hams, as well as salt-cured beef; dozens of kinds of salamis; ready made things like porchetta, pâtés, and head cheese; and fresh sausages that need to be cooked.  It’s a greatly expanded version of a deli meat counter in the US. 

When Christian was here in the first week of the semester, we bought some hand-sliced jamon iberico bellota, also known as pata negra bellota, a specialty from Spain that is much more expensive in the US, if you can find it.  Bellota is the highest grade of pata negra ham: made from a special breed of pigs that are raised free-range in forests where they eat mostly acorns, aged at least 36 months.  It has a flavor that I can only describe as profound: much deeper and more complex than prosciutto.

Moving on in the market: there are stalls that specialize in spices, or bulk products like rice, beans, and polenta.  There are at least two stalls devoted exclusively to eggs, and two more that sell things that might be classified as snacks for the aperitivo, a pre-dinner drink: nuts, dried fruits, many varieties of cured olives, appetizer biscuits, and so on.

Finally, there are mini-grocery stores: some devoted to the basics, with selections of dried pasta, canned goods, etc., while others are specialty stores, like the Asian grocery I visit with the easy-to-remember stall number 222.  I was very happy to discover that I could buy coconut milk, fish sauce, jasmine rice, chili pastes, fresh cilantro and so on without having to take the metro across town to the Asian Supermarket. 

In addition to food, you can also do the rest of your shopping at the market: there are stalls selling kitchen supplies, toiletries and cosmetics, cleaning supplies, and even grocery caddies for your market shopping.  I probably should have invested in one of these at the beginning of the semester, a lesson that I learned while trying to carry enough to feed 22 people back from the market in plastic bags.  

And to top it off, there is a bulk wine store, where you can refill your own bottles with a large selection of wines for between 2 and 3 dollars per liter.

It’s interesting that the market is thriving in 2023, when so many urban markets have disappeared or been diminished.  There are commercial supermarkets in Rome, even in my neighborhood, but people still flock to the traditional market. I think there are two reasons: one has to do with the geography of Rome and of neighborhoods like mine, and that will be the subject of the next post.  The other is the cultural premium that Italians place on fresh, in season ingredients.  The latter will be a recurring topic throughout my Rome series of posts.

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