The Daily Diary of a Wandering Restaurateur
Winter Planning Session: Market Day in Montepulciano
Thursday is market day in Montepulciano, and since we haven't had our market fix yet on this trip, it is time to check it out and get our porchetta (roast pork) fix. The market runs from 7-1. When we got down there around 10:30 the place was hopping!
These markets are mobile, almost gypsy-like events that roll into most mid-sized towns throughout Italy and France one day a week. The vendors are primarily local and tend to work a specific geographic area. With at most seven markets a week (more realistically perhaps four or five), there is a practical limit if one wanted to hit the same towns every week. In some cases, the stalls belong to shops in the same town and offer the same same stock (or sometimes a larger and/or cheaper selection of the items they carry every day.
Some of the food trucks are very high-tech and specialized while other vendors selling things like produce and clothing just set out tables. Back in the day, the markets were a way to bring an array of products to the local populace who had limited means of transport.
In may towns, the market is set up in the main piazza, but because access to Piazza Grande in Montepulciano is so difficult and parking so limited, the market is set up in the parking lot at the bus depot. It had grown a lot since the last one we attended six years ago and I was surprised by the number of clothing vendors of all sorts.
Had we been here last Thursday, we could have easily found the down vest I searched Rome to find and Margene's fedora. We could have also found chain saws, hardware, drug store items, kitchen supplies, linens and who knows what else? But the place was packed (finding parking was tougher than in San Francisco) and it was chilly, so we did a quick walk-though, got half a kilo of porchetta and some roasted potatoes and called it good.
They were replacing some exterior piping on the Cantina Corciani a few doors down from us. It looked like about 2" copper. Very pretty and very expensive. I couldn't tell what it was for, but the man doing the work was a good 25-30 feet in the air working from this very cool little cherry-picker sort of contraption. The physics of it all escaped me (there hardly seemed to be enough counter-balance when the guy was working out at full extension. It runs on tank-like treads, guided through the streets by the remote controller at the end of the kinky cord. The operator just walks alongside and directs it. I can see that it would be very difficult to maneuver a full-sized truck into some of these narrow streets.
The afternoon clouded up, so we just kicked back. We did, after all, have social obligations to think of. Giacomo Stuart, our landlord, joined us in the early evening for cocktails and conversation. He generously brought a bottle of Vin santo, a local dessert wine and a bowl of assorted home made cantucci (biscotti). Nice. Don't let the name fool you. Giacomo was born and brought up in Italy, it's just that his ancestors came here from Scotland back in the early 19th century.
His English is excellent, if occasionally a little difficult to understand, but we had a wide-ranging discussion that turned our visit into more of a personal event and less of a straight lodging transaction. He was quite interested in A Place of Hospitality, my program to put hospitality back into the hospitality business (and into the world, for that matter). I hope we will have further discussions on how we might bring these notions to Italy.
We weren't hungry enough for dinner, so we snacked a bit and called it enough. Maybe tomorrow we'll find a new favorite place. Maybe our apartment is it!
© 2012 Restaurant Doctor
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