Florence food markets: Sant'Ambrogio vs Mercato Centrale

Florence has two food markets that matter, and they are not interchangeable. One is a landmark with a food hall on top. The other is where I actually shop. Here is how to use each, and how to get a real morning out of either.

Sant’Ambrogio or the Mercato Centrale: which should you visit?

If you have one morning, go to Sant’Ambrogio. It is smaller, cheaper and quieter, and the people at the stalls are mostly selling to Florentines, restaurant cooks among them. If you want a first look at Florentine food with an easy lunch attached, the Mercato Centrale is the gentler start. The real answer is both, on different days, for different reasons.

The Mercato Centrale (San Lorenzo)

The big iron-and-glass hall in San Lorenzo, behind the leather stalls, opened in the 1870s and is two markets stacked on top of each other.

Downstairs is the real market. Butchers, cheesemongers, salumi, fruit and vegetables, dried porcini in sacks, and the tripe sellers, where you can try lampredotto, Florence’s oldest street food: slow-cooked cow’s stomach in a bread roll with green sauce. It is better than it sounds. The ground floor trades in the morning, Monday to Saturday.

Upstairs is a food hall. Pasta, pizza, wine, cheese and sandwich counters around shared tables, open every day until late evening. It is useful, it is never closed, and it is where to go for a quick lunch or pasta to go. It is not where Florentines do their shopping.

Go for: lampredotto at a counter, a first look at Tuscan produce, lunch on a day when everything else is shut.

The Sant’Ambrogio market

A smaller iron hall east of Santa Croce, with stalls spilling out on all sides. Inside are the butchers, the bread, the cheese and a few counters selling fresh pasta. Outside, under the awnings, are the fruit and vegetable sellers, several of them selling what they grew. Beyond them, household goods and clothes, which you can ignore.

This is the market where restaurant cooks buy, and it shows: prices are lower than at the Mercato Centrale, the produce follows the season closely, and the stallholders will tell you what is good this week if you ask. It trades in the morning, Monday to Saturday, and the neighbourhood around it, with its small trattorias, is one of the best places in the city to eat lunch afterwards. My guide to handmade pasta in Florence starts here for a reason.

Go for: shopping for a picnic or a kitchen, seasonal produce, a sense of how Florence actually eats.

When to go

• Weekday mornings, before ten. The best produce goes first, and by early afternoon stalls are packing up.
• Not on Sunday. Both markets’ traditional stalls are closed; only the food hall upstairs at the Mercato Centrale is open. If your free day is a Sunday, see what to do in Florence on a Sunday.
• Saturday is busiest, because the city shops for Sunday lunch. Lively, but slower.

How to shop a Florence market

• Point, don’t touch. At most produce stalls the seller picks for you. Say what you want and when you will eat it (“per stasera”, for tonight) and they will choose accordingly.
• Buy by the etto. 100 grams. “Due etti di pecorino” is two hundred grams.
• Say buongiorno first. It sounds trivial and it changes the whole exchange.
• Bring some cash for the smaller stalls.

What to buy in season

In autumn, which is the best season to visit a Florence market: fresh porcini, chestnuts, wild boar at the butchers, persimmons, and from late October the new season’s olive oil, green, peppery and briefly the best thing in the market. In winter, cavolo nero and the bitter greens; in spring, artichokes, broad beans and fresh pecorino; in summer, tomatoes that make the case for the whole trip.

For things to carry home: aged pecorino, dried porcini, good olive oil and bronze-cut dried pasta all travel well. More on what is worth eating while you are here in what to eat in Florence.

Mercato Centrale or Sant’Ambrogio: which market for a cooking class?

Sant’Ambrogio, if you want to shop where Florence’s cooks shop, and that is where our market tour and cooking class in Florence, Mercato & Mani, begins. The Mercato Centrale is the better-known name, but for a morning spent choosing what to cook, the smaller market wins for all the reasons above. And a market is more fun when someone can tell you which stall to trust and what to do with what you bought: you walk Sant’Ambrogio with Endri or Marsel, choose what looks best that morning, then carry the basket back to our Oltrarno kitchen and turn it into fresh ravioli, a slow ragù and a seasonal dolce, and sit down to eat it together. About five hours, max six guests, €145.

Short on time? The three-hour pasta class skips the market and goes straight to the flour.