Italian Market

Where it sits. The market is a street rather than a building: roughly nine blocks of South 9th Street running between Fitzwater Street and Wharton Street, through the Bella Vista and Passyunk Square neighbourhoods about a kilometre south of Independence Hall. Both kerbs are lined with permanent stalls under corrugated metal awnings that have been patched, re-patched and painted so many times that the structure reads as a single low arcade. Produce is stacked outdoors in crates on the pavement; the shops behind the stalls sell what cannot sit in the weather. In January the vendors light scrap-wood fires in steel drums between the tables, and the smoke sits under the awnings all morning. It is one of the few genuinely un-prettified commercial streets left in a major American city centre.

How it started. Italian immigrants, mostly from Abruzzo, Calabria and Sicily, settled these blocks in the 1880s and 1890s, and a boarding house run by Antonio Palumbo became the anchor of the community. Curbside selling grew out of that concentration and had hardened into a permanent market by around 1915. The market advertises itself as the oldest continuously operating outdoor market in the country, a claim that is difficult to test but not obviously wrong. Several businesses along the street predate the First World War: Fante's Kitchen Shop has sold cookware here since 1906, Isgro Pasticceria has been making cannoli since 1904, and Di Bruno Bros opened its cheese counter in 1939 and still cuts to order in a shop barely wider than a corridor.

On screen. In the training sequence of Rocky (1976), Sylvester Stallone jogs north up 9th Street through the market while stallholders call out to him and a produce seller lobs him an orange. The shot was taken with a Steadicam operated by its inventor, Garrett Brown, moving backwards ahead of the runner — one of the first public outings for the rig, and the reason the footage glides rather than jolts. The scene was filmed among real vendors on a working morning, which is why the reactions look unrehearsed. At the southern end of the market, at the fork where 9th Street meets East Passyunk Avenue and Wharton, the film also used Pat's King of Steaks, where a plaque now marks the spot where Stallone stood. The route the montage implies is not walkable in that order, but this stretch of it is real and unchanged in its essentials.

What has changed since. The market is no longer only Italian, and that is the most interesting thing about it now. From the 1990s onward, Mexican businesses established themselves at the southern end below Washington Avenue — taquerias, tortillerias, grocers stocking dried chillies by the sack — and Vietnamese and Cambodian shops appeared along the same blocks. South Philly Barbacoa, which began as a weekend lamb operation, brought national attention to that half of the street. The result on a Saturday morning is a market where you can buy fresh ricotta, banana leaves, whole hanging pig, Sicilian oregano and durian within four blocks of each other, and where the calls from the stalls come in three languages.

Practical detail. Most stalls open around 9am and start breaking down in mid-afternoon; Mondays are thin and many shops close, and Sunday is quiet apart from the restaurants. The 9th Street Italian Market Festival, on a May weekend, closes the street to traffic and adds a greased-pole climb, which is the one day the market is genuinely crowded shoulder to shoulder. Cash still moves faster than cards at the produce tables. The pavements are narrow, uneven and frequently blocked by crates and hand trucks, and delivery vans double-park the whole length of the street, so this is not an easy stretch for wheels of any kind.

Getting there and what is nearby. The Broad Street Line's Ellsworth-Federal station leaves a five-minute walk east; the Market-Frankford Line and a short walk south from Society Hill also work, and from Independence Hall it is about twenty-five minutes on foot. East Passyunk Avenue, angling southwest from the market's bottom end, has become the neighbourhood's restaurant row and makes the obvious continuation of a morning here. For anyone tracing the Rocky geography, the sequence that makes narrative sense is market first, cheesesteak at the fork, then the ride or long walk northwest to the museum steps — roughly five kilometres, and considerably less heroic in practice than on film.