Though nearly every major European capital has a Sunday "flea market," I like the one in Rome best. It's cheaper than its Paris equivalent, provides better bargaining opportunities (offer only 50% of the asking prices, and stick to your guns), and has a far wider selection of articles-everything from seventeenth-century candelabra to second-hand toothbrushes!
For those unfamiliar with the term, "flea market" refers to a big open field in Rome on which merchants, every Sunday, set up make-shift booths, or spread a blanket on the ground, for the sale of every conceivable second-hand article-clothes, old gramophones, wooden Sicilian statues, old busts and medals of Mussolini, fraying at-the-edges etchings and posters, antique door-knobs. if you bargain properly, you can stock up on amazing values, limited only by your estimate of what you'll be able to stuff in your suitcase. Naturally, you'll be heartbroken over having to pass up the bulkier items that are too heavy to lug across Europe. Hope still dreams of the two 6-foot-long torches-on-a-pole, painted pale blue and yellow (the kind that lean out from a wall, at an angle), which we couldn't carry away from our last trip to the Rome flea market.
The flea market in Rome is located at the Porta di Portese (bus from Terminal Station goes within 3 blocks of it), in the Trastevere section-ask anyone to point the way-and operates only once a week, on Sunday. It's such an exciting, colorful sight that I've placed it here, because you'll want to see it, even if you don't plan to buy a thing.
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