The Porta Portese flea market in Trastevere in Rome
This Rome information blog about the Porta Portese fleamarket in Trastevere is written for the guests of the B&B Chaplin Hostel Rome.
Porta Portese, the biggest and most colourful flea market of Rome and Italy, is held every Sunday, in the quarter of Trastevere, around the Via Portuense and the Via Ippolito Nievo.
Over two thousand dealers have stalls at Porta Portese and you can buy anything at the flea market, from antique wardrobes to the tiniest and most banal household goods.
There is an atmosphere of semi-illegality at Porta Portese: Between the official market stalls the “vu-comprà”, in the past mostly Africans, nowadays also many Chinese and Bangladeshi immigrants, have set up their blankets and cardboard boxes with fake sunglasses, CD’s, DVD’s, hand bags and cheap jewelry.
Professional thieves are meanwhile trying to sell the cell phones and photo cameras they stole in the course of the week in the center of Rome or on the same day at the market itself.
Officially the Porta Portese flea market starts at 5am every Sunday morning and continues till more or less 2pm, but in reality many stalls start packing up 1 or 2 hours earlier than that, especially when it rains or during the hot Rome summer months when the Romans abandon the Eternal City in droves.
Both the crowds and the, sometimes rather aggressive, stallholders can be quite overwhelming, so in a separate Porta Portese blog entry I have written some tips on how to deal with the market.
From the Chaplin Bed and Breakfast the Porta Portese market can be reached by taking the 64 bus from Termini to Largo di Torre Argentina, and then taking the number 8 streetcar.