Pretty much every town has a market that rolls into town the same day in the week. This means shutting down roads to cars and you are not able to park in the parking lots during the posted time for them to set up and take down their stands.
It makes it a little hard to find parking if you are staying in the heart of the city, so most times you have to keep driving in circles until a coveted spot turns up.
This morning we put our laundry into the washer at the laundromat and and walked down the street to outdoor market. It was lightly raining but that didn't impact the vendors from selling their wares. When I was young and visiting Italy, my parents would always find the markets so we could buy things for cheaper. So that is what I expected today. Instead, I found things very pricy. There were some clothes that I thought were cute and a longer jacket that I thought would be great to use when walking in the rain but when I looked at the price it would be over 100 Canadian dollars. Definitely not worth it.
We found a vendor selling olives, amoretti cookies, cheese and sausage. But what was interesting about the experience of purchasing cookies and cheese was that the vendors were very pushy. Trying to make you taste everything even though I kept saying it was too early to eat most of the items he was trying to push. Maybe they eat olives, cheese and sausage at 9am but I just couldn't do it.
Gianni did try the amoretti cookies and decided to buy two of each kind. I had read that the Tome di Mottarone cheese is a specialty in the area so I wanted to buy a little chunk but ended up with a bigger chunk then expected. What was mayhem in my mind, was when the vendor put the items on the scale he quickly put some numbers in and came up with magic number that we owed 42 Euros. So to put it in perspective that is 52 Canadian dollars for these two items:
And to think at the Essalungo Superstore we purchased a whole fridge full of meat, cheese, veggies, drinks, cookies and condiments for 200 Euros. Is the market worth it in Italy? Maybe if you are from here and know exactly what they are doing and keeping them honest but for this girl from Canada, I think we got schooled.
Here are some photo's of the market area
Most Italian's have a washer but not a dryer in their home as it is too expensive to run the dryer. Or if they are in a small condo they may not have any washer either. If they have a washer they have option of hanging them on clothes hanger to dry or go to their local laundromat to dry them. Therefore laundromats are very popular and have seats in them as well as coffee machine so you can kick back and read a book, enjoy a coffee while you do your laundry.
The laundromats are great in Italy because they are clean and efficient. The machines are big so you can do one big load and not spend a lot of time doing it. Of course you can use two machines at once and therefore laundry can get done quick. The machines don't use money as you have to buy gettone, which are Italian tokens for the machines. You get 1 gettone for 1 Euro. We put 20 Euro into the gettone machine and got 20 gettoni.
Armed with our gettoni, we put our laundry into the washer and picked the coloured option. Put in a laundry puck and 7 gettoni and the machine washed for 45 minutes. For some reason the laundry pucks make the laundry smell so nice that you don't even have to use any other freshener.
The laundromat has big laundry baskets which you can place the wet laundry into and then place them into the dryer. Again you choose the option you want, which I choose high dry, and put in 1 gettone for every 10 minutes of dry time. I put in 2 gettoni and sat and got caught up on social media while the 20 minutes passed. I was really surprised that everything was dry after 20 minutes. I think the trick is the machine tumbles the clothes clockwise for one minute then stops and tumbles the close counter-clockwise for a minute. It keeps doing this until the dry time expires. This process allows for the clothes to really separate and dry more efficiently.
Here is a video of the typical town market and laundromat:
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