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'Spendoccocus Romaniensis': Shopping Fever in Rome's Haggle-Happy Flea Market
| Article
# : |
19971 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
2,623 Words |
| Author
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Nino Lo Bello
Nino Lo Bello is an American writer based in Vienna. |
There is only one known antidote for what happens to tourists in Rome's haggle-happy flea market. Some experts call shopping there "The Disease." The germ, Spendoccocus romaniensis (which men say primarily attacks women), brings on an acute case of shopping fever. Dollar bills provide a quicker cure than penny-cillin.
The world's largest open-air mart, the flea market takes place on Sunday mornings and sprawls for three-quarters of a mile along the banks of the Tiber River. It opens at sunrise, when the air in Rome is gentle, and continues at a furious pace until one o'clock. Then it closes, and sellers pack up and haul away their marvelous piles of junk.
No one knows when the market actually started, but it probably goes back to the era when the Tiber served as the port of Rome and Roman sailors did a bit of illicit trade on the side. The walls that surround the market were built by Pope Urban VII in 1590, and the gateway that leads to the oversized sale bears the insignia of Pope Innocent X, who reigned from 1644 to 1655. The enormous marketplace already was hoary with age, however, when these pontiffs came into office.
A few weeks ago a situation arose that led me into the Rome flea market. I needed a Sicilian gun belt, with cartridges, for an amateur play I was staging. The one I had stashed in my apartment had been filched by a burglar a few nights earlier. We were close to dress rehearsal, and it looked as if the local police could never retrieve the belt. There is a saying in Rome concerning the flea market: Anything stolen during the week is bound to turn up the next Sunday morning. I also remembered Vittorio de Sica's neorealistic movie Bicycle Thief, in which a harried breadwinner goes to the Mercato di Porta Portese (the market's official name) in search of a stolen bike he needs for his new job.
So I set out for the flea market. Arriving by seven o'clock, I had hopes of locating a cartridge belt before the thousands of serious buyers had a crack at the outdoor stalls. An Italian friend, Antonio, a statistician for the United Nations, insisted on escorting me. He argued that I needed protection from the sharpie salesmen and their ocean of enticing clutter: "These people have decades of haggling behind them. I can't let you go there without the necessary shield that an old Roman hand like myself can give you. As a foreigner you would be considered fair game, but with me at your side, you would at least have a sporting
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