We Live Above the Market
Living above the Monday market in Borgo Val di Taro means 7:30 a.m. sounds like stalls assembling, wine crates being unloaded, and a rotisserie truck starting its spits. Ten years in, it also means the wine man knows your preferences without being asked,
The sounds of Monday morning
We found out what "living above the market" actually means at 7:30 on a Monday morning in May 2016. We had been in the apartment for maybe four days. From somewhere below our windows came the sound of a traveling market assembling itself — stall by stall, crate by crate — on the street directly beneath us.
We had almost taken a different apartment. That one was near the church. We would have been knocked out of bed by the bells at 7:30. The market noise, by comparison, was entirely acceptable.
So we pulled on our shoes and went down to look.
I grew up with American farmers markets. They mean local produce, artisan jam, somebody's homemade honey. Worthy, all of it, but essentially one category of thing.
What happens below our windows every Monday is something else entirely. Produce, yes — mountains of it. But also clothing stalls the size of small boutiques, shoes, home goods, curtains, wine, a hardware stand, the Italian equivalent of a dollar store, and the thing I love most: a large rotisserie truck where chickens, porchetta, and rabbit turn on spits until they're the kind of thing that makes you revise your dinner plans on the spot.
We have bought lambrusco secco from the wine man at that market for almost ten years. He knows what we want. We don't need to explain it.
500 meters. That's how long Borgo Val di Taro’s centro storico is, roughly, from one end to the other. On market day, those 500 meters contain most of what a household needs for the week. We start out at Bar Centrale for due cappuccini. And because I made a decision about a month into Italian life that my waistline was not going to tolerate a full brioche (cornetto/croissant up here in the High Valtaro) every single morning, I take a small two-bite portion from one end of Joe's. He gets the rest. This arrangement has held for close to a decade and appears stable.
After breakfast, we first wind through centro storico, stop at the butcher (he grinds the beef fresh, while you wait, which is one of those small things that makes you feel like you made the right decision about your life).
Then we head for the market (it is “on the way home” after all!), pick up something from the produce stall, wander past the salumiera, and end up at the rotisserie — Hell's Kitchen, they call it — where the spits have been turning since early morning.
Here's what I didn't fully understand until it was taken away.
In February 2020, Italy went into one of the strictest lockdowns in Europe. We didn't leave our apartment for months, except to take out the trash (a privilege we apparently argued over, which tells you something about day 41 versus day 1). We are, by nature, homebodies. Joe and I can spend days in each other's company without either of us going stir-crazy. We had, as I pointed out to anyone who would listen, been training for exactly this scenario for four years.
And yet.
The Italians call people like us gente di abitudine — creatures of habit. Possibly noiosi — boring. We are both. What I didn't understand until the quarantine was that our routine was not just a pleasant way to fill the hours. It was infrastructure. The morning cappuccino was where we ran into the friend who told us how to sort the tessera sanitaria. The Monday market was where the wine man learned our preferences. The aperitivo was the daily recalibration: the hour that separated "work time" from "evening." Without those fixed points, the days became long and formless in a way that had nothing to do with the apartment being small.
A quarantena — the word comes from the Venetian practice of keeping ships at anchor for forty days during the Black Death to prevent the disease from coming ashore. I distinctly remember when we hit day 41. My friend Elisa pointed out, when I mentioned we were on day "quarantuno della quarantena", (day 41 of the quarantine) that this seemed deeply wrong. She was correct. Forty days is a quarantine. Forty-one is just showing off, and of course, the restrictions continued well into 2021, and many prudent people were adamant about keeping some of them (especially masking) into 2022 (there will be more on this in a future post)!
What I missed, specifically: the bar knowing our order before we sat down. The butcher grinding the beef. The wine man. The aperitivo. Saying buongiorno to the woman at the produce stand. The structure of a day that moves through town rather than through rooms.
I knew we had built an actual life here, rather than an extended vacation, because I felt the loss of every single piece of it.
Nine years later, the routine is still the routine. The wine man is still at his stall. Bar Centrale still knows what we want. The Monday market still fills the street below our windows at 7:30, and we still go down and walk through it, and the spits at Hell's Kitchen are still turning.
My business runs on American time zones, which means most of my working hours don't begin until mid-afternoon Italian time. The mornings belong to cappuccino and the market. Aperitivo time belongs to the bar. The evenings, when it's warm, belong to the veranda — we eat dinner there and watch the last of the passeggiata wind down in the street below.
Life is good here.
It is specifically, measurably, routinely good: good in the way that you only know it's good because you once spent months without it, counting down to the moment you could go back.
The part nobody tells you before you move
Daily life is not a backdrop. It IS the life. The market, the bar, the butcher, the wine man: these are not local color. They are the infrastructure that makes everything else work. The question worth asking before you move is not only "where do I want to live?" It's "what do I want my Tuesday to look like in year five?"
If you're planning a move to Europe and want to make sure you're building toward the right Tuesday — and not accidentally stepping on the landmines that blow up the whole plan before you get there — the Landmine Map is a good place to start.
