Mercat de Sant Antoni

This guide to Mercat de Sant Antoni in Barcelona starts with what turned up when engineers tore into the market for a renovation: a two-thousand-year-old Roman road, once lined with tombs just outside ancient Barcino's walls. It traces the market's own 1882 origins as a cast-iron landmark designed by Antoni Rovira i Trias, and how a secondhand book fair fleeing the Paral·lel avenue settled here for good in 1936, as Spain slid toward civil war. Sundays still bring browsers to the same pavements above the buried gate.