Last week I posted about our lunch at Mercato Centrale in Florence. That report was focused on the food options at the large market: some of which are located downstairs—where we ate—and most of which are located upstairs. Of course, Mercato Centrale is not just a food hall. The food counters, and especially the formal food hall upstairs, may be what attracts the tourists, but the ground floor houses a large and active market. At the front of the market are the salumi and cheese and pasta and dry goods sellers; but if you go a bit further in you’ll find the butchers, the fishmongers and the fruit and vegetable sellers. We wandered the market for a while after eating our sandwiches and pizza and here now is a look at that part of Mercato Centrale.

The gallery below begins with a look at more of the prepared food options. As you’ll see there are more places to sit and eat downstairs than just Bambi, where we ate our lampredotto and tripe sandwiches. Personally, I think there’s more atmosphere at these counters downstairs than in the massive food hall upstairs—but even if you choose to eat upstairs you should really spend some time in the market proper. The first lot of pictures of the market show some of the wine and dry goods sellers; these are followed by pictures of the meat counters, the fish and seafood counters and finally the fruit and vegetable sellers.

Among the last group I was pleasantly surprised to come upon a few Bangladeshi vendors and to see that they’ve made inroads into an iconic market like Mercato Centrale. They had a large range of desi vegetables on offer and also mangoes. And I don’t mean the crappy mangoes sold in mainstream Italian markets—basically the same crappy mangoes sold in mainstream American markets—but desi mangoes. If you’ve been following my posts from Italy closely, you might remember that I’d bought some very tasty mangoes from a Bangladeshi store in Rome. Well, in Florence my mango life improved even more unexpectedly: one of the vendors at Mercato Centrale was selling Himsagars, the classic Bengali mango, grown in both West Bengal and Bangladesh. I bought a few and I can tell you these were among the very best things I ate in Italy. From another Bangladeshi vendor I bought a few more mangoes of a varietal that was new to me: Rupali. These were good too, if not at the level of the Himsagars.

Alas, we were not able to buy anything else from the market. Our AirBnb’s kitchen was not really set up for proper cooking and so as tempting as the vegetables and seafood, in particular, were, I had to resist. If we ever come back to Florence, I’ll make it a point to find a flat with a proper kitchen and take advantage of the excellent markets in the city (the next day we went to another even closer to our flat). And perhaps these pictures will inspire you to do the same on your first/next visit to the city.

Alright, my next post will be a report on the dinner we ate at a restaurant on the evening of our visit to Mercato Centrale. (I do realize I’d said that at the end of the previous report as well.) That should be later this week, maybe even tomorrow.