The slow return of the city night market
For a decade they were left for dead. Now, under the same lanterns, a new generation is rebuilding the night market — one stall, one recipe, one argument at a time.
By Elena Russo · Photographs by Kai Mendel · 18 min read
The first stall to come back sold only one thing: a flatbread folded around whatever the seller's mother had cooked that afternoon. There was no sign, no menu, no name. People queued anyway, drawn by the smell and the simple fact that something was open after dark in a square that had been silent for eleven years.
That was two springs ago. Today the same square holds forty stalls, a dispute over noise that reaches the city council most months, and a waiting list of vendors that runs to next year. The night market, declared dead so many times that its obituary became a genre, is alive — and it is arguing with itself about what it wants to be.
A square that forgot how to stay up late
To understand the return you have to understand the leaving. The markets did not die of one thing. They died of rent, of supermarkets, of a decade when the city decided that the most valuable thing a public square could do was stay empty and clean.
“We didn't lose the market because nobody wanted it. We lost it because nobody was allowed to run it.”
That line belongs to Sofia Marchetti, who at sixty-one is both the market's unofficial historian and its most feared critic. She remembers the old market and refuses to be sentimental about it. The food was sometimes bad, she says. The hours were brutal. But it was the one place in the neighbourhood where the rules were written by the people standing in it.
The argument is the point
What makes the new market different is not the food, though the food is better. It is that the people running it have decided, more or less on purpose, that the friction is a feature. Who gets a pitch, what counts as local, how late is too late — these are not problems to be solved but conversations to be kept going.
It is a fragile way to run anything, and everyone involved knows it. One bad winter, one unsympathetic council, one landlord with a better offer, and the lanterns go dark again. For now, though, on Thursday nights, the square remembers what it is for.
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