Before you get all misty eyed thinking about the bucolic ideal of the farmer trucking his bounty into the city every day, you should know that much of the produce at the Campo di Fiori market (and others) is imported from places as far away as Chile. The rhubarb is Dutch and the strawberries Spanish.
Still, if you restrict your purchases to produce grown on Italian soil you can do pretty well. And at least one stand had quite a fair amount of things grown in Lazio, the province where Rome sits.
A lap around the market on Monday made me wish I had a few more days in The Eternal City, and maybe a small kitchen of my own to do a little cooking.
This is romanesco, a kind of cauliflower:
Young garlic and onions, a sure sign of the season:
These baby artichokes — carciofini — are begging to be fried:
This is castelfranco, a mild radicchio with beautiful red flecks:
I would grill these heads of treviso. You know, if I had a grill.
But i don’t, and so I had to buy lunch:
So much for all those vegetables.
These pictures make me lust for spring and everything verdant and fresh. I now have to go to the kitchen and smell my little bunch of parsley for about ten minutes and say a little prayer that Chicago will eventually get a season other than Ick.