The morning fruit-and-vegetable market on Campo de Fiori is one of the most famous in Rome, spreading across a long rectangular square in the heart of the historic centre. The square sits in a dense knot of small streets between Piazza Navona and the Tiber, and has hosted a market on most mornings of the week since the late nineteenth century. The name, the Field of Flowers, evokes the meadow that occupied the space before the great works of Pope Sixtus IV in the late fifteenth century turned it into a paved piazza. Until the unification of Italy in the nineteenth century, the square was a horse market and a place of public execution, the most famous of those executed being the philosopher Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake here in 1600 for heresy. A dark bronze statue of Bruno in his hooded Dominican robe, by the sculptor Ettore Ferrari, stands at the centre of the square, raised in 1889 by anticlerical politicians at the height of nineteenth-century church-state quarrels and still a focus for those marking the anniversary of his death each February. By day the square is given over to the market, with rows of stalls selling fruit, vegetables, flowers, spices, cured meats, cheeses, fresh pasta and a slightly tourist-oriented range of olive oils, vinegars and pasta cuts in colourful packaging. The flower stalls at the southern end carry on the original character of the place. In the afternoon the stalls are dismantled and the square becomes a busy open-air drinking spot, with cafes and small bars filling the perimeter and tables spilling onto the cobbles. Restaurant terraces along the surrounding streets fill in the evening, and the square remains lively until the early hours. Easily reached on foot from any of the major sights of the historic centre, Campo de Fiori is one of the few central squares of Rome that has retained a genuinely working market alongside its tourist role, and the daily contrast between the bustling morning trade and the relaxed evening crowds gives the place a layered, lived-in character that is hard to match elsewhere in the city.

Type: Market / Mall

Address: Campo de Fiori, Rome, Italy