Urban food markets and community development

Urban food markets and farmers’ markets are firmly linked to Italian cities’ traditions. These are the locations where local rural identity, local food products, and culinary traditions find their physical expression. Moreover, they contribute to making cities more attractive for residents and tourists as well. These markets successfully represent the identities of the place where they are located. Urban food markets and farmers’ markets are able to reflect the mutability implicit in the term identity, by adapting to the changes regarding the people and the geographical spaces modifying the offer of food and goods efficiently sold by their stalls thanks to the relationship between producers and consumers. By hosting different culinary traditions these markets are crucial in driving gastronomic tourism that can exist, indeed, only if products are a direct expression of the region, authentic, original, of high-quality, and symbolic. In order to investigate these dynamics and to better understand the complexities of this particular foodscape, we carried out a study characterized by a multidisciplinary approach in some representative urban food markets in the city of Rome.