Italian Outdoor Market, Food and Wine Stalls, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Italian Outdoor Market, Food and Wine Stalls, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Italian Outdoor Market, Food and Wine Stalls, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-8A2464

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Twice a week in postwar northern Italy, the piazza became a temporary economy, and this one is running at full capacity. Wheel-shaped cheeses are stacked at one end of a cloth-covered table while fiaschi — the straw-wrapped Chianti flasks that would spend the next two decades decorating the walls of every Italian restaurant in America — stand in clusters at the center, being negotiated over with the seriousness that Italians reserve for transactions that actually matter.

The vendor seated at the far end of the table has the composed authority of someone who has been selling here since before the war and expects to be selling here after everyone present is dead. The man in the blue sweater leaning across the table has not yet accepted her price. This is the part of the market that takes the longest.

Around them, the piazza fills with the ordinary traffic of a 1950s Italian market day: bicycles, a ball vendor doing brisk business on the edge of the square, and a crowd that came for food and stayed because there was nowhere more useful to be on a Tuesday morning.

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