We spent most of our last full day in Florence not in Florence but in Pisa. It’s a fairly quick train ride and we decided to use up on one of our days in Florence on that visit and keep our upcoming days in the Tuscan countryside a little more relaxed. A good decision, on the whole, even if it meant punting on a few museum visits in Florence. Truth be told, with the kids, there’s a limit to how much museuming we can do on a trip anyway, and the previous day negotiating the crowds at the Uffizi and the Accademia had pretty much exhausted the adults’ energies and patience as well.

What was definitely a good decision was picking up a picnic lunch before departure for Pisa at the Mercato Sant’Ambrogio.

Though not as large as the Mercato Centrale—and definitely not as full of tourists looking for a meal—the Mercato Sant’Ambrogio is actually the oldest market in Florence. It is located in Piazza Lorenzo Ghiberti, which was conveniently just a few minutes walk from our flat. It is a true neighbourhood market, opening at 7 am and closing at 2 pm (Monday to Saturday; it’s closed entirely on Sundays). It’s just the one indoor level, which houses butchers, fishmongers, and other counters offering prepared foods and provisions; a very large green market sets up outside and there are some stalls selling other things there as well.

There’s an alternate universe version of our trip to Florence in which our days were centered not on visiting tourist sites but on going to Mercato Sant’Ambrogio every morning to buy fresh ingredients to cook for the day’s lunch and dinner, with the time between lunch and dinner and after dinner spent taking cooking classes and lazing on a piazza somewhere with a cocktail or coffee. That would also have been a very good trip. On this trip, however, all we had time for was a quick stroll through the market after picking up our sandwiches (which we ate a few hours later on the lawns behind the Battistero di San Giovanni in Pisa). As is my wont, I took a lot of pictures and here they are.

I was particularly taken by the greenmarket, especially the absolutely perfect-looking tomatoes and eggplant. There were a couple of South Asian fruit vendors here as well, and one of their stalls had desi mangoes. I didn’t want to carry mangoes to Pisa and back and so hoped to stop back in the next day to get some before heading to the car rental—but, alas, it didn’t happen. In that alternate universe version of the trip we would also eat a lot more desi mangoes in Florence. Again, in all seriousness, the Himsagar mangoes I purchased at Mercato Centrale were among the very best things we ate in all of Italy.

Alright, here’s the gallery. At the end you can see the sandwiches we ate for lunch. Prices were almost ludicrously reasonable. Scroll down after clicking through the slideshow to see what’s coming next.

Alright, just one more Florence report to go. That will be of the takeaway pizza dinner we ate after getting back from Pisa in the evening. I should have that up on Tuesday. After that meal reports from Tuscany, Padua, Venice and Milan will be interspersed with meal reports from Dublin till I run out of both. Sometime in September the Twin Cities reports will also start up again. Our time in Dublin is almost at an end. We’ll be back in our home in Minnesota by the end of the day on Tuesday. But through these reports this long summer away will be extended a little.