Mercato Vecchio, or Old Market (Real)

Mercato Vecchio, or Old Market (Real),The important centre of Florentine popular life, where Tito Melema on his first day in Florence hears the populace discuss the news of Lorenzo de' Medici's death, and first sees Tessa. "A broad piazza, known to the elder Florentine writers as the Mercato Vecchio, or the Old Market. This piazza, though it had been the scene of a provision market from time immemorial, and may, perhaps, says fond imagination, be the very spot to which the Fesulean ancestors of the Florentines descended from their high fastness to traffic with the rustic population of the valley, had not been shunned as a place of residence by Florentine wealth. In the early decades of the fifteenth century, which was now near its end, the Medici and other powerful families of the popolani grassi, or commercial nobility, had their houses there, not perhaps finding their ears much offended by the loud roar of mingled dialects, or their eyes much shocked by the butchers' stalls, which the old poet Antonio Pucci accounts a chief glory, or dignita, of a market that, in his esteem, eclipsed the markets of all the earth beside." The Mercato Vecchio, which in the time of Romola was the "heart of Florence" and the centre of Florentine commerce, was the oldest part of Florence. It no longer exists, having been swept away 1885-9 to make way for the modern Piazza Vittorio Emanuele. Its life and manners are described by many of the older Florentine writers, notably Antonio Pucci and Franco Sacchetti, the latter of whom has been called the "Echo of the Old Market".

<em>Romola</em>

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