Mercato Centrale

Trip Start Feb 07, 2008

Trip End May 03, 2008

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Flag of Italy Florence, Italy
Thursday, February 14, 2008

We have heard of the Central Market since we arrived as a place where we could go shopping for just about anything. It's true, you can get almost any kind of meat, vegetable or fruit you can think of. Inside a sort of nondescript metal and steel building there are lots of stalls covering two floors and everyone from locals to students occupying the space in-between.
On the first floor we found the butchers and the bakers, and the fish...we came in the door right by the fish and boy was that a welcoming smell. "Pesce" varieties being sold include whole eels, anchovies, and many different types of squid. Past this area is the "carne e pollo", the butchers were very friendly but something about a man heaving around a big cleaver and smiling and laughing with passersby is a little disconcerting. They offer any type of meat you can imagine: tripe, brain, cow nose, pig head, salame, chicken with feet intact, rabbit, squab (small bird who's name I forget right now), etc, etc

Olives

. It really sinks in when a man shorter than you - and I am not very tall - walks by with a huge rack of raw ribs over his shoulder, whose weight is making him even shorter.
Around the corner from all the carnage are the many stalls of "Pane" - breads/pastas - that smell wonderful and if you're lucky are offering samples, yum. Some of them even have "dolci" - sweets, usually referring to sweet pastries of some type - and there are just too many of these to even begin to try and describe.
After finally making it through the maze downstairs we tackled the upstairs, so wonderful and so much warmer than the ground floor. There really are more types of fruit than I have ever seen here. I've heard of all of them sure but some I've never actually seen and then to see what they do with them, dry them, jelly them, etc, is very interesting. I bought some dried apricots that have never tasted sweeter. I also tried a Clementine that looked like it was made of glass, it was so shiny and sweet! I tried to capture the amount of beautiful colors on display with my camera but the atmosphere is what I couldn't get and what makes the market so great. There were countless types of nuts and beans and olives, ooh the olives were gorgeous! The gentleman let us sample a few and they were good but really really salty, not what California is used to at all. Some of the stall owners spoke a little English but most none at all and that made it really exciting. Especially when I tried to ask what a certain type of food they were offering was and they began to tell a story that involved each of us laughing pointing to our stomachs and laughing some more, who knows what I said cause there's no way I know what he said!
On the way out of the market we passed the area that sells cheeses and they were offering samples of Parmigianino Regiano and it was really nice to be able to try the real thing, Kraft has nothing on real cheese or at least Parmesan. The wheels of cheese they were cutting from had to weigh as much as a small child, they were massive.
We plan on going back at least once a week just for the immersion experience.