Rome blog for Bed & Breakfast Chaplin Hostel

8 Porta Portese Tips

This Rome information blog about the Porta Portese fleamarket in Trastevere is written for the guests of the B&B Chaplin Hostel Rome and the Bed and Breakfast Little Italy.

The Porta Portese flea market: Big crowds in small spaces, pickpockets, gypsies, aggressive stallholders, chaos… Here follow some tips on how to best visit Rome’s liveliest Sunday morning spot.

1. Get up early and avoid the biggest tourist crowds.

2. Bargain! The word “tourist” is written in large letters on your forehead so the price of things doubles as soon as the stallholder lays his eye on you. Getting something for less than half of the original asking price is not exceptional in Porta Portese.

3. Before starting to bargain, try to figure out for yourself how much you would be willing to pay for an object. Unless you are an expert, you will not know its real anyway, so just, so begin by using your own common sense.

4. Speak English. Being friendly and using your humble and respectful mouthful of Italian just puts you at a disadvantage and increases your chances of being humbly and respectfully taken for a ride.

5. Be extremely careful for pickpockets, especially after 10am, the peak time of the Porta Portese flea market. Like most streets in the ancient part of Rome, the ones in Trastevere are extremely narrow and you will be forced to shuffle rather than walk through the crowds: a paradise for pickpockets and gypsies.

6. Do not keep your wallets in your back pockets, keep your backpack and phot camera in front of you where you can see them, and hide your valuable possessions underneath your clothes, or leave them in the room of your hotel, hostel or bed and breakfast.

7. Obvious, but still: nothing, really nothing offerd for sale at the Porta Portese flea market dates from ancient Roman times.

8. Buying a fake Louis Voutton-bag or Rayban-sunglasses can get you fined. This is rare, but when it happens, play the dumb and humble tourist game.

9. Do not be afraid, be careful, otherwise you might forget to enjoy the market and Porta Portese is well worth it.

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.

The Pope’s socks

This morning, preparing breakfast at the Chaplin B&B, one of my guests told me that she had found the perfect souvenir to take home from Rome. Walking through the center, in the Pantheon area, they had stumbled upon the store that supplies the Pope’s robes and they had bought a pair of socks there, as a gift for their friends.

They remembered the name of the shop, Annibale Gammarelli, but couldn’t tell me the address, so I googled it. Most of the articles that came up were in German and one of them was intriguingly titled the “Soutane-Krieg”.

Gammarelli, Euroclero and the Cassock War

Gammarelli has been supplying Popes with their wardrobes since 1793, but when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict he apparently changed tailors, preferring to stick with Euroclero (Piazza Sant’Uffizio, 4), the shop where he used to have his Cardinal’s wardrobe made.

As usual Annibale Gammarelli had been ordered to make the first set of garments for the new Pope, in three different sizes (small, medium and large), since nobody knew yet what size was going to fit the still to be elected Pontiff. None of them fit perfectly, though. Benedict had chosen the smallest size, but this turned out to be too short for his height, so the new Pope returned to his trusted Euroclero.

Though the Pope has decided to stick with Euroclero, Gammarelli will continue to be known as the pontifical tailoring firm. They firmly denied that the Pope had changed tailors, claiming that the clothes made by Euroclero should be seen as an “occasional gift to a friend”.

Central locations of and directions to Gammarelli and Euroclero

The address of Gammarelli is Via di Santa Chiara, 34 and the phone number (+39)0668801314.
From the Bed and Breakfast Chaplin and the Rome Hostel Little Italy you take bus 40E and get off at Largo di Torre Argentina. Turn right into either the Via di Torre Argentina or the Via dei Cestari and the second street you cross is the Via di Santa Chiara.
To get from the B&B’s to the Piazza Sant’Uffizio you take the 40E all the way to the end of the line, just outside St. Peter’s Square, and then walk around the Vatican.

The Città dell’Altra Economia (The City of The Other Economy) in Rome is the first permanent market in Europe where there is only space for alternative economies and none at all for multinationals.

The Città is situated in the Roman quarter of Testaccio, on the Campo Boario of the ex-Mattatoio. The objects that are sold are characterized by the fact that they have been produced without harming nature or people.

The surface is immense, 3.500 square kilometers, more than half of which are covered. The style of the complex has been adapted to that of the surrounding buildings and electricity is completely obtained through the use of solar panels.

The entrance of the Città dell’Altra Economia is in Largo Dino Frisullo. From Hostel Chaplin Bed and Breakfast Rome you take the underground (line B) from Rome Termini to the stop Piramide.

Opening hours: Tue-Fri 10-21; Sat 10-23; Sun 11-19.