shopping in romeT

fashion
markets
souvenirs
bookshops

Rome is a simply marvellous place to go wild with your credit card, although the English or American visitor may initially find some drawbacks to shopping in Rome. One problem is the siesta, (everything closes for the entire afternoon) The other is a certain slackness where the Trade Descriptions Act is concerned. (I don’t think they have one).
There is no ‘consumer-power’ in Italy. Shopping in Rome you are generally at the mercy of retailers who regularly sell faulty goods that they will not allow you to return, even on the same day of purchase.

The more specialist shops have a habit of keeping everything behind the counter, so you can’t browse or choose or examine what you want to buy before needing to ask for help. This is difficult for us cold and reserved Brits, as it forces us into a dialogue of somewhat redundant intimacy with the sales person, and if our Italian is not good, we may well leave the shop without buying anything at all,or if we do, we will forever wonder if there was not something much nicer, (which we would rather have bought) hidden somewhere behind the counter. But the sheer choice of beautiful things available for purchase in central Rome more than makes up for any inconvenience you may initially experience in adjusting to Roman sales techniques though.
Italians are design addicts - They love innovative design, and they always like to have the latest thing. This means there’s some jolly nice stuff in Rome for the buying, not least fashion...

buying fashion
(la moda)

Although Italian menswear tends to be a bit non-U, Rome is nevertheless great for women’s high and radical fashion, bettered only by Paris or Milan.
If you’re seriously shopping for couture items there are wonderful shops all over central Rome, but the main place to be is the Via Condotti and Piazza di Spagna, which it runs into.

However, beware - you are likely to pay over the odds for fashion in Rome as the only reason for the existence of the high fashion designer retail outlets in Rome is you - the well-heeled tourist.

The commercial home of fashion in Italy is in fact Milan, but of course there's not much worth seeing in Milan from a tourism point of view, so the couture houses make their money by siting their retail outlets in Rome, where all the tourists are. And that means inflated prices. If you want your fashion dollars to go further, ignore the Rome shops and head straight for Milan. But if you'd sooner stick with the romance and glitz of buying in Rome, no-one would blame you.

Another consideration is that because it's a tourist trap, fashion is sold just like any other souvenirs - There's some pretty tacky stuff around that even the top houses will try to peddle off to the tourist with more money than fashion-sense to make a quick buck. The fashion industry is not exactly notorious for holding scruples - buy into the dream by all means, but don't buy into the hype. If you really want to blow all your cash at the inflated prices on the Condotti, then at least check out this month's Vogue and Elle to see what's actually on the catwalks this month, before letting yourself get fobbed off with an end of line dog from last season. Or keep it safely classical. Most of the major fashion houses are represented: Valentino, Max Mara, etc, etc. If you’re in the habit of buying haute couture, you’ll know this already of course, but even for window-shoppers, it feels good to just stroll down Via Condotti anyway and dream…

souvenirs

We’re not really into souvenirs at Romebuddy, souvenir collecting being the somewhat plebeian pursuit that it is, though having said that, you will find that tourist souvenirs in Rome tend to be nicer than those in other big world cities. They are mostly very well made miniature replicas of all the famous statues and landmarks of Rome and Italy in general. Michaelangelo’s David and Moses are favourites, along with a very romantic hybrid version (just visible in the appallingly scanned picture above) of David snogging a nude Roman beauty which is so tacky, it's positively gorgeous. There are souvenir stores located at all the major tourist hot-spots of course (Trevi Fountain, Coliseum etc) as well as a whole street-full of them near the Vatican and they all sell pretty much the same stuff so it’s worth haggling to knock the price down a bit - If one stall-holder won’t budge on his price, another one may. There are also many gift-shops selling nice prints, posters and postcards featuring some excellent photographic renditions of Rome.
If you travel a lot and are in the habit of buying souvenirs, we’re fairly confident that the ones you buy in Rome will still be sitting on your mantelpiece or hanging on your walls long after those collected in other countries have been stashed away and forgotten in a dusty drawer somewhere.

bookshops

Italians are into books in a big way, and Rome is choc-a-bloc with terrific bookshops. Most have foreign language sections so you can usually find English versions of the more popular titles. But Italians excel in art books and those large glossy coffee-table tomes full of photos. There’s a healthy graphic novel and anime interest in Rome, as well as mile upon mile of more intellectual and philosophical stuff if you can read italian.
Many street-markets also have book sections, and there’s a large book-market near Termini station. If you only want English books, visit
The Economy Book and Video Centre, at Via Torino 136, tel 474 6877.
They sell only English books and also hire out English movies on video. They also sell used books so you can save a quid or two, which is particularly good, new books in English being normally quite expensive, having been specially imported.
You can also buy The English Yellow Pages there.

markets

Street-markets in Rome are numerous, and like markets anywhere they’re good for bargains. The most notable in Rome is the Porta Portese flea market in Trastevere. Sunday is the big day for this, and while there is a lot of fairly average tourist bric-a-brac there, if you get there early enough, this long straggling market also has some pretty amazing things on sale, too numerous to mention here. But watch out for pick-pockets and many market stallholders running a short con on unsuspecting tourists with more money to burn in their pockets than common sense in their heads. There's a sucker born every minute - Just make sure it isn't you.
The other popular market is Campo dei Fiori (Field of Flowers). A very popular tourist haunt, being a picturesque open-air flower and greengrocery market in a piazza deep in the middle of old Rome. Looks like something straight out of a fairy-tale book when its in full swing.

(This page was all about fun-shopping; But if you need info on how to shop for essentials, the things you actually need in Rome, rather than just things you want, click here)