Abstract

Public markets, from the close of the eighteenth century to the present day, have been considered an anachronism doomed to disappear: an intermediate step in the sequence from the outdoor marketplace of pre-industrial cities to today’s shopping centres. Nevertheless, their extraordinary resilience and their resurgence in recent decades as outdoor markets or as re-valued market halls, reminds us that their history cannot be considered closed. The city food market as an elementary expression of retailing has been and continues to be present in all cultures. Conditioned by commercial policies and regulations, city food markets are still part of the urban mix of various forms of retailing. For this reason, they are an observatory of the history of retailing and of its differences in time and in space.