FORMAL ESSAY: MORE THAN A MARKETPLACE

In the stereotyping of cultures, food has been associated with Italian culture as the most distinct part of Italian social life. I cannot say whether or not the cooking and sharing of large, delicious meals truly marks the most important act of social life in Italy, but after spending a month and half in Venice I feel I can avow that the basic notion that food holds a special place in Italian culture is at least accurate. First off, I can see it. In Venice, the relationship between food and social life is everywhere; osterie, trattorie, and bars, where residents of the city gather to chat noisily, can be found along most calli and in most campi. Also, I have been told that people buy a lot of fresh foods to take home for cooking. In the mornings I have walked through and shopped at the open produce markets of Venice, where Venetians come to choose ingredients for the meals they cook at home. Whether cooking food in the home or eating it out, Italians seem to use food as a strong infrastructure in their society. In Venice, though, this tradition is taken a step further. Buying the ingredients for home cooked meals is just as much a part of the social aspect of food as the cooking and eating parts. The purchasing of food at the Venetian vendors brings a social aspect to the meal even before the food is cooked and it is a tradition that has lasted for centuries. History and society have shaped the behaviors of people in the produce marketplaces to become a telling part of Venetian life.

For the sake of having a proper understanding of the subject, I will describe the vendors themselves. The produce vendors in Venice are wide, sloping tables, usually complete with an awning to protect the fresh goods from the sun or rain, stacked with fruits and vegetables that customers can easily browse with their eyes, checking in one glance both quality by color of the produce and origin and price by large white signs stuck into the piles of produce. When a customer approaches the vendor, it is a known rule that they cannot touch the produce, even when they want to buy it. Vendors always take their customers' orders ("three large tomatoes, please"), choose the produce, then present it to the customer for inspection; this is a custom that probably originated from the days of plagues in Venice during which touching of the fruit was even regulated by the state (Francesca Furlanis, personal interview). Today, when buying from vendors, they will often come out around their stalls to pick out produce side by side with their customers, which gives the process of buying a more interactive and verbal spirit. The location of vendors is also particular. Located throughout the city in all of its different sestieri, vendors can choose where to set up shop. Some vendors set up spots in the main marketplaces to which Venetians flock in the mornings and on Saturdays when prices drop, while others set up in the calli where vendors encounter less competition. Location can affect both the price of goods and the type of customers. In the marketplaces, the vendors are setup side to side and back to back and as shoppers wander through the market they check for better prices, making competition tougher. In the calli, vendors may have less customers, but they often attract customers such as the elderly who are willing to pay higher prices for fresh produce closer to home.

Price and convenience, though, are by far not the only considerations of Venetian vendor customers. I spoke with Francesca Furlanis, from the Venice International University, about the customs and cultural purposes of the produce markets in Venice in order to gain better insight into their societal importance. At the time I knew nothing about Venice’s vendors, and I was interested in understanding whether the markets served simply an economical purpose or whether they added to Venice’s social circles. As it turned out, as I have said, the vendors are places of social interaction upon which Venice relies as sort of nodes of social contact. Francesca herself is a regular patron of the produce vendors and she offered some very interesting insight into market life in particular. People who buy from vendors in Venice tend to care more about their personal experience while shopping and their experience after shopping, or while cooking and eating, than about either price or convenience. According to Francesca, one priority is the relationship customers have with their vendors on levels of trust and privacy. Customers usually find a vendor they can rely on for quality produce who will keep a semi-formal or business relationship with them to become “regulars." When I visited the market, I even saw customers hurry to their regular vendor, hand them a list of needed items and wait while the vendor picked out and bagged their produce. During two of those visit, I also bought fresh figs and learned the importance of having a fresh fruit vendor one can trust. The first time I bought four delicious figs for under a euro, but the second time I bought a kilo of figs from another vendor that I soon discovered were nearly all rotten, and simultaneously discovered that I probably should not trust that vendor. Freshness, Francesca said, is also one of the main reasons for buying produce from a vendor. The produce at the vendor is usually fresher, sometimes having been picked on one of the islands next to Venice, and fresher ingredients means better home cooked food. I asked whether the sign of an independent new family might be their presence in the produce markets or at the vendors and Francesca agreed. If a wife, for instance, had a regular vendor she bought from, her extended family would probably show slightly more respect to their independence because of her effort made to cook quality food.

The vendor culture in Venice demonstrates the Venetian appreciation for home life and for their community because they combine the two when they bring their private life into the public space of the market. As Francesca noted more than once, the produce markets heavily serve as meeting places for friends and for people living in different parts of the city that would otherwise never get the chance to interact. Sometimes friends who do not even intend to purchase produce will stop by the market to chat, and especially to gossip, with each other because the market is the only place they can rely on as a meeting spot. Everyone has to eat, everyone values fresh produce, and therefore everyone will be there to chat and gossip. This communal aspect of the marketplaces is what Francesca said she likes most about shopping at the vendors, over shopping at a grocery for instance. The social side of the vendors, with all its various purposes, is another example of how Italians mix food and social life to continue the popular concept that food is the most important part of Italian social culture. From what I can tell, it seems like a pretty sweet tradition, especially when you can buy, from the right vendor, fresh figs for under one euro; and, if you are a Venetian resident, that also means shopping with friends.