Boqueria Market in Barcelona

[jwg]

At the edge of the Rambla in Barcelona is an incredibly huge market. It's been there since 1200 although many improvements have been made and it has expanded considerably. There are other markets, but this is the biggest one. There was a lot of everything there with many fish, meat, vegetable, candy, etc. vendors. Deciding where to buy would be a tough decision. I do wonder if they actually sell all the potentially spoilable stuff everyday; there was a pretty big inventory of fresh fish for example. We wandered through for a while and I snapped a bunch of pictures. Here a few:

Click here for these photos

Comments

[come-to-think.livejournal.com]

Some years ago I was on a business trip to Montreal, and our hosts took us to a wonderful fish market in preparation for dinner. It was better than a museum. Huge trays of ice on which hunky men dumped tubs of fresh seafood. No little plastic containers of lox fragments, but a whole smoked salmon a meter long, hung on a wall. It reminded me of that poem by Milosz:

In Rome, on the Campo dei Fiori,
Baskets of olives and lemons,
The pavement spattered with wine
And strewn with flower petals,
The pink fruit of the sea
Flung on the counters by vendors,
Armloads of dark grapes
Fall on the softness of peaches....

That was 1600, tho, so they wouldn't have had ice.

[rsc.livejournal.com]

We spent much of a morning in Campo dei Fiori when we were in Rome last year. Wonderful market. I don't suppose Milosz would have included the packages of penis-shaped pasta.

[come-to-think.livejournal.com]

He lived until 2004, so he may have experienced phallic pasta. Giordano Bruno (the subject of the poem) presumably did not %^). I gather there is now a statue of him there, and certain rebellious students have declared it a "Pope-free zone".