rome 2011: shopping at the porta portese market

tutti per un euro! there must have been 100 stalls like this

i landed in rome early on a sunday morning and knew where i wanted to go...porta portese market! my hotel room wasn't going to be ready for several hours but the concierge was kind enough to keep an eye on all my stuff while i took off to go dive headfirst into the madness. i realized on the flight over that i had forgotten to bring a converter so i could charge my cameras...damnit...so that gave me extra incentive to brave the crowds.

porta portese market, so named for the giant city gate that marks the "start" of the market, is held early on sunday mornings just across the tiber from via marmorata in trastevere. thousands upon thousands of vendors come to ply their wares to thousands upon thousands of buyers in about a one square mile area over the course of about six hours--it is a mad crush of noise, goods, humanity, sights, smells, and basically anything else you can imagine (except, oddly, there is almost no food there, unlike every other market in rome)...and then it is gone as quick as it came. the prices are rock bottom and everything is negotiable; criminal activity (pickpocketing, theft) is going on in the melee but it isn't rampant and there are several cops around--you should definitely experience this ginormous flea market/goodwill/dollar store for yourself if you can!

gotta love the license plates--i taught the vendor how to say "eye-owa" rather than "ee-owa," but "pottawattamie" was completely out of the linguistic question

i could easily see queen sophie riding this through the marketplace, with a stuffed panda strapped on the back

lots and lots and lots of beads--they seemed to be stone, too

scarf fluffer--there were guys like this who every 15 minutes or so would grab big piles of their stuff and turn over the stock, to pull what was on the bottom to the top

voluminous jewels

fancy panties

seeds--where the hell do people grow anything in rome?

very cool buttons in any possible size, color combination--there must have been a hundred thousand buttons at this stall

very cool retro phones that weigh like 20 pounds each

stockings with which to bestocking your legs

fierce kitteh

frames--i loved these wooden handpainted beauties and i wish i would have bought some

yes, you can even buy your wedding dress at porta portese market

cacti--noli le tangere!

ephemera

metal ephemera

chandelier ephemera--there were thousands of crystals at this stall, one of which i'm sure would have matched our lovely chandelier and corrected its prism lacuna

honestly, i love this--and i was tempted to buy it--enlarge the photo and see if you can identify more than four actual english-language words in the text (spellcheck before you screenprint, people!)