Mercato di Sant’Ambrogio

(This is part of our series of posts from our six-week Road Scholar Independent Living and Learning in Florence trip to Italy in Spring 2025. We have an index to all the posts from that trip here.)

This morning, Cheryl’s “Survival Italian” class visited Mercato di Sant’Ambrogio, one of the oldest markets in Florence, to learn how to shop for fresh food in Italian. (The class was supposed to take place early in our stay, but heavy rains that day caused the tour to be postponed.) Here are some of photos of the beautiful produce, meat and seafood offerings they saw.

Beautiful heirloom tomatoes:

Cucuzza squash, a type of edible gourd similar to zucchini (except you have to peel them, because the skin becomes hard like plastic when cooked):

Nespole (loquats) from Spain:

Zucchini with the flowers still attached. We don’t see these in U.S. markets very often, but as we’d discovered by this time, the delicate zucchini flowers are delicious when they’re cooked–often stuffed with soft cheese, lightly battered and deep-fried.

Purple artichokes:

From left to right: piccione (pigeon), anatra muta (mallard duck), faraona (guinea fowl) and rabbit (far right) at the butcher shop.

Octopus, shrimp, and other seafood:

A collage of photos from the 1966 flood of the River Arno, displayed in a lounge in the Mercato di Sant’Ambrogio. The flood devastated much of Florence, smashing debris up against priceless artifacts like the Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise on the Baptistery and submerging medieval artworks in feet of mud and muck. The recovery and restoration took years.