If something works, don't fix it

One of Rome's largest and most longstanding markets, Testaccio (open since the early 1900's), got "moved" in 2012. Not sure why, but walking past the market's old location today, I saw its piazza under reconstructive surgery. Probably building an apartment complex or something.

The market's new digs would make anyone from Calgary (or other Canadian urban centre) cry out in joy if it was built there. It's now the kind of market urban planners love, and in fact the signs on the wall boast of the "eco friendliness" and "sustainability".

Unfortunately, it's also sterile and lifeless and not what an Italian street market is like.

The outside

The inside

Look familiar? Think Eau Claire market, not Granville Island. Oh, sure, it still has the Italian stuff in it.

Tomate 

My Soeby's doesn't look like this 

Fresh pasta 

Caricofi 

Verdura 

Men's shoes. 

A popular cheese shop 

Ladies shoes & bags 

Octopus and something ugly 

Pottery 

Fish, I assume

But content is one thing, the "feel" another. They should have left it alone in it's old home of 100 years. So we didn't stay long.

Instead we wandered along the Aurelian Wall, city fortifications built in 275 AD...

Part of the wall. Good stuff behind it, though... 

Porto San Paolo

...then went into the Protestant Cemetery (really a cemetery for foreign non-Catholics), where both Keats and Shelly are buried, which happens to be tucked up against the backside of the wall.

The cemetary

Keats 

Guess who? 

Not a Protestant place exclusively 

Cemeteries are photogenic places

Not very far away is a remnant of the Servian wall, built in 400 BC as a predecessor to the Aurelian Wall -- now conveniently being used as the retaining wall for an apartment building.

Nice of them to cut it up

We then wandered back through Testaccio into Trastevere, into the motorcycle and bicycle district of town.

Roof bullets and chairs and other stuff for sale 

A bike shop, Rome style, with lifts to get the bikes to the ground 

Helmet anyone?

Tomorrow we'll be back to this exact place for the weekly Porta Portese flea/junk market.