Lunch on our third full day in Rome also featured pizza but it was not eaten at a restaurant; it also featured more than pizza. We took the bus out of of the tourist center to check out and eat at Mercato Testaccio. As the name indicates, Mercato Testaccio (or Mercato di Testaccio, if you want to be more grammatically correct—though the market’s own signage clearly doesn’t) is located in the Testaccio neighbourhood. Unlike a market like Campo di Fiori—where we had fruit juice earlier in the day—Mercato Testaccio is located indoors, in a modern building that lets in a lot of air and light. It is filled with stalls (or boxes in the market’s parlance) that range from clothing and shoe stores to butchers and fishmongers to fruit and veg sellers to a range of food purveyors. In the center is a seating area where most people vie for tables to eat. In other words, it’s along the lines of similar markets found in many large cities around the world, including Minneapolis’ own Midtown Global Market.

Like other similar neighbourhood markets in Italy, Mercato Testaccio is not open all day every day: it opens from 7 am to 3.30 pm, Mondays through Saturdays and is closed on Sundays. And the fishmongers and butchers start winding up and putting away their wares well before 3.30 (which is why not very much of that is featured in the slideshow below).

We were very hungry when we arrived and so didn’t fully explore the market’s prepared food offerings before making our selections. We alighted quite quickly on two adjacent vendors/boxes: Rosa Cibo Italiano and Casa Manco. The specialty at Rosa Cibo Italiano is piadine (piadina is the singular), which is essentially a flatbread wrap. It apparently has a pretty long history. If you haven’t encountered piadine before, as you’ll see in the slideshow below, the flatbread itself looks very much like a large flour tortilla. And indeed it pretty much tastes like one too. It’s not filled like a burrito or quesadilla though—and not, for that matter, like an Indian roll. The fillings are laid on one half of the piadina and the other half is folded over. Rosa Cibo offers a large number of filling options. Being somewhat overwhelmed by the selection I just went with the first on the daily specials board: prosciutto and figs. (Later I kicked myself for not picking the porchetta and chicory.)

From the adjoining Casa Manco we got another selection of pizza by the slice, Roman-style. This part of the ordering was handled by the missus and so I don’t know exactly what was on everything but the quarter of selections featured the following: prosciutto; zucchini flowers; pancetta; and, again, prosciutto and figs. All involved cheese of one kind or the other.

We carried our food over to the central seating area where we were lucky enough to score a table for four right away. As we ate, we were serenaded by a charismatic older gentleman in a tuxedo and eyepatch, singing what he described as “Frank Sinatra-type songs” in English. These included actual Sinatra standards and also things like the Beegees’ “How Deep Is Your Love?” (you can watch 10 seconds of the latter here). While he sang, a woman in a wedding dress—presumably his partner—danced around and occasionally walked around with a basket for financial contributions. It was all very kitschy and fun. The food, meanwhile, was very tasty—even if the pizza was not at the level of Pizzarium the day before and the piadina as genre didn’t particularly wow us (though we did very much like the flavours of the filling in ours).

After eating, we wandered the market more fully and realized there were many more food vendors we might have considered (though most had heavier fare than we had been in the mood for). The fish, meat and fruit and veg stalls made us wish we could buy things to take home and cook but a) we had a long afternoon ahead of us of touristing in the blazing heat of Rome and b) we had dinner reservations. If you are enticed by this report to visit Mercato Testaccio as well, and want to do it less haphazardly than we did, you can check out the market’s website here.

For a look at the market and what we ate there, click on an image below to launch a larger slideshow. Scroll down to see what’s coming next.

We did like the look and less hectic feel of this part of Rome and if we ever get to come back [we probably won’t] we’ll probably look for a flat in a neighbourhood like this, in the vicinity of a market like this. And if that neighbourhood were to be Testaccio and the market, Mercato Testaccio, all the better.

Only one Rome report left to go. That is of the dinner we ate on this day in another neighbourhood outside the tourist center. I’ll try to get that out this weekend. Tomorrow I’ll have the third of my trio of reviews of whiskeys from the Teeling distillery.