Mercato di Sant'Ambrogio
While the San Lorenzo market draws tourists, locals do their serious shopping at Mercato di Sant'Ambrogio, a covered iron-and-glass hall built in 1873 in the eastern Oltrarno. Here you will find butchers who have held the same stall for three generations, fishmongers with the morning's catch and vegetable vendors who know every farmer by name.
Inside the Hall: What to Buy and Eat
The indoor hall is best for cheeses, cured meats, fresh pasta and the kind of offal-forward Florentine street food — lampredotto (tripe), schiacciata flatbread, crostini di fegatini — that you will not find at a tourist-facing trattoria. The lunchtime trattoria inside the market, simply called Trattoria da Rocco, serves a two-course lunch for under €10 and is beloved by market workers and office staff alike.
Outside the hall, stalls spill onto Piazza Ghiberti selling seasonal produce, cheap clothing and household goods. In autumn look for porcini mushrooms, fresh chestnuts and the first Chianti-season grapes.
The Neighbourhood Around the Market
Sant'Ambrogio sits in one of Florence's least touristed residential neighbourhoods, a short walk east of Santa Croce. The streets around it — Via dei Macci, Via Pietrapiana — are lined with unpretentious bars and family-run alimentari that make for excellent pre- or post-market wandering.
The nearby church of Sant'Ambrogio itself contains a miraculous tabernacle by Mino da Fiesole and Filippino Lippi's fresco of a miracle of the sacrament — almost never crowded and entirely free to enter.
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