Mercato delle Erbe
Iron-and-glass covered market built to contain street vendors once evicted from the city's main square.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Mercato delle Erbe in Bologna opens in Piazza Maggiore in 1888, where women known as the treccole sold vegetables until officials of the newly unified Italy, embarrassed by the baskets, mud, and shouting, raised rents and pushed the sellers out. It follows the treccole through decades of exile to smaller squares, refusing to vanish, until the city finally gutted the old San Gervasio barracks and raised an iron-and-glass market hall over it in 1910. The guide also traces what the building survived afterward, through the Second World War and into its postwar rebuilding. Stand under the iron lattice among the produce stalls and listen for how the fight began.
This audio guide was created using AI.