Genoa’s Orientale Market: a guide to the temple of taste

The smell that grabs you before you even enter

There’s a moment, walking along Via XX Settembre toward the center, when the air changes. You don’t see it, you don’t hear it with your ears: you smell it. A subtle current of basil, fresh fish, aged cheese and spices seeps between the arcades and takes your hand. It’s the smell of Mercato Orientale. And if you’re from Genoa, that smell is something very much like the concept of home.

The market doesn’t wait for you at the threshold: it comes looking for you. Before you even cross through the cast iron gates, before you see the gleaming fish counters and mountains of vegetables, you feel that you’re about to enter a place different from the rest of the city. A place where Genoa stops running and pauses to look at what it’s eating.

For visitors from outside, Mercato Orientale is often a revelation. They expect a market, and they find something more: they find the beating heart of Genoese cuisine, the place where chefs choose their raw materials, where grandmothers already know at dawn what they’ll cook for lunch, where the Genoese relationship with food reveals itself unfiltered, authentic and a bit rough — as the Ligurian character demands.

A history spanning almost two centuries

Mercato Orientale was officially opened in 1899, when the structure designed by engineer Cesare Gamba was inaugurated in an area that previously housed the Augustinian convent of Nostra Signora della Consolazione. The choice of name is geographical and somewhat ironic: it’s located in the eastern part of the historic center, just to distinguish it from other city markets, but has nothing to do with the geographic Orient.

The construction is a fine example of late nineteenth-century eclectic architecture: an iron and cast-iron structure that recalls the great French market halls of the period, a glass roof that floods the interior with natural light, columns supporting a spacious and airy central nave. Genoese people from the late 1800s who entered this space for the first time — accustomed to the old open markets in the caruggi narrow alleys — must have felt something akin to wonder. An entire palace dedicated to food.

In the decades that followed, the market became the food reference point for the bourgeois neighborhood that developed around Via XX Settembre — the major commercial artery also built in the late 1800s to connect Piazza De Ferrari with Piazza della Vittoria. While the caruggi kept their small specialty shops and alleyways fragrant with focaccia, Mercato Orientale became the place where the emerging Genoa — merchant, pragmatic, demanding — did its daily shopping.

The market traversed the twentieth century with all its changes: two wars, economic boom, organized large-scale retail distribution that eroded neighborhood markets throughout Italy. Mercato Orientale survived, adapted, maintained its centrality. And in the early 2000s, a major renovation brought new life and vigor to a structure that risked aging poorly.

The structure: navigating it without getting lost

Entering Mercato Orientale without a mental map can be disorienting. The space is large, there are many stalls, and scents overlap and compete for your attention. It helps to know how it’s organized before crossing the main threshold on Via XX Settembre — though there’s also an entrance from Via Galata, on the opposite side.

The ground floor concentrates the market’s most traditional soul: here you find the fresh fish counters, vegetables, cheeses, meat, cured meats, aromatic herbs. It’s the level where time seems to flow at a different pace, where merchants know customers by name and where a quick shopping trip easily transforms into a twenty-minute conversation about the best way to cook anchovies.

The fish deserves a long pause. Genoa is a seaside city that truly cares about the sea, and the fish counters of Mercato Orientale prove it: Mediterranean sea bass and gilt-head bream, red mullet, sole, squid, octopus, and when the season allows muscio — mussels — in quantities that would make any coastal market jealous. Arriving early in the morning means finding fish at the moment it’s still gleaming, with lively eyes and gills of intense red. The fish counter never lies about freshness.

Ligurian cheeses deserve separate discussion. Prescinsôa — the fresh curd typical of Genoa, slightly tangy, indispensable for authentic torta pasqualina and proper pesto — is found here, in white, trembling forms that seem made of cloud. Nearby, brüsco, sheep’s cheeses from the Riviera, fresh tomini. It’s one of the few places in the city where you find these products with any regularity.

Aromatic herbs and vegetables complete the picture: bundles of small, fragrant basil — not always the DOP from Pra’, but often locally grown — side by side with preboggion, that mix of wild and cultivated herbs that is one of the forgotten foundations of Genoese cuisine. Preboggion changes composition with the season and with the vendor: borage, chard, cicerbita, nettle, fennel. Buying a bunch means taking home a piece of the Ligurian countryside.

MOG 2019, the upper floor of Mercato Orientale transforms. Where there was previously underutilized space, MOG — Mercato Orientale Genova — is born, a modern food hall that has the courage not to renounce the context in which it finds itself.

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MOG — Mercato Orientale Genova (Upper Floor)

Gastronomy · Historic Center

Via XX Settembre 75r, Genova

Tuesday–Sunday, lunch and dinner (check website for evening events)

Variable by offering, mid-range

Modern food hall on the upper floor of Mercato Orientale. Genoese street food, Ligurian wine, carefully selected international cuisine. Hosts events and themed dinners.

MOG is not your typical shopping mall food court. It’s a space that takes a nineteenth-century structure and engages it with a contemporary project: Genoese and Ligurian street food counters, a wine bar, carefully selected international cuisine offerings, and the chance to sit down, eat, and enjoy a glass of Pigato or Vermentino while Genoa carries on outside.

Among MOG’s offerings you’ll find focaccia in its various forms, fresh pesto to buy or eat on the spot, Cantabrian anchovies (one of the few concessions to fish that isn’t strictly local, but of excellent quality), fried fish, freshly baked vegetable pies. It’s the right place if you want to eat well without sitting down at a restaurant, or if you’re looking for something to take away that tastes like true Genoa.

MOG also functions as a cultural space: it hosts events, presentations, and themed dinners. Keeping an eye on their calendar if you’re in town for a few days can bring interesting surprises.

What to Buy: The Shopping List of a True Genoese

If you enter Mercato Orientale with the intention to shop — and you should, because it would be a shame to just look — there are a few things that deserve particular attention. This isn’t an exhaustive list: it’s a starting point to navigate the stalls without losing focus in a thousand directions.

Fresh basil is the first item. Even though DOP basil from Prà is more easily found in specialized herb shops or directly from producers, the market’s basil is still fragrant and fresh. Choose small leaves with bright green color and no dark spots: that’s a sign the plants haven’t been stressed by excessive heat. Genoese basil has a delicate, almost minty aroma that has nothing to do with the large supermarket basil.

Prescinsôa, if you find it, is a must-buy. It’s one of those products that simply doesn’t exist outside Genoa: this fresh, slightly tangy curd is the secret ingredient in many traditional preparations. A few spoonfuls in pesto dough — according to some family traditions — gives it a different creaminess. In torta pasqualina it’s indispensable.

Salt-cured anchovies are another cornerstone. Look for those from the Cantabrian Sea if you can find them: they’re the most prized, with firm flesh and a flavor that’s salty but not aggressive. In local culture, Genoese anchovies aren’t an ingredient to hide, but a protagonist: on olive oil, on bread, as the base for pinzimonio.

Finally, cheeses: beyond prescinsôa, ask about Ligurian mountain cheese if the counter has it. Small artisanal producers from the Ligurian hinterland make sheep and goat cheeses with character, little known outside the region but full of personality.

The Insider Tip: The Right Time and the Secret Route

Genoese people go to the market early in the morning. Not out of laziness or habit, but because they know: the best fish disappears by ten o’clock. The most sought-after fresh cheeses run out. The best vegetables are taken by restaurateurs who are there from seven. If you arrive at Mercato Orientale after eleven, you’ll still find plenty — but not the best.

The route that few people take is entering from the Via Galata entrance instead of Via XX Settembre. The main entrance is more crowded and tends to distribute visitors in a disorderly way. From Via Galata you enter from the cheese and herbs section, which is the least chaotic area and often the most interesting for those who come out of gastronomic curiosity rather than daily shopping.

One last detail that only those who frequent the market for years know: some of Genoa’s best savory pies — the vegetable pies, rice pie, farinata — are not bought at the MOG upstairs, but from some of the historic stalls on the ground floor, where the women arrive in the morning with steaming trays that are gone within an hour. They have no signs announcing them as specialties: they’re there, and they vanish.

How to Get There and Hours

Mercato Orientale is located at Via XX Settembre, 75r, in the heart of Genoa. It’s reachable on foot from Piazza De Ferrari in less than ten minutes, walking through the arcades of Via XX Settembre — one of Italy’s most elegant covered passages. By public transport, the nearest metro stop is De Ferrari, from which the market is a ten-minute walk.

The ground floor of the market is open Monday to Saturday with morning hours: generally from 7:30 to 13:00, with some stalls remaining open until 13:30. Saturday is the liveliest and richest day in terms of offerings — but also the most crowded. Thursday, for reasons lost to neighborhood tradition, tends to have an excellent selection of fish. The MOG on the upper floor has different hours, generally extended to afternoon and evening: it’s worth checking their website for special events and openings.

Those staying at our residences in Genoa’s historic center are less than a quarter hour’s walk from the market — a perfect distance for a morning stroll that is already an experience in itself.

Mercato Orientale as a Gateway to Genoese Cuisine

There is a way to visit Genoa that many tourists never discover: the way the city’s own inhabitants visit it. Not starting from museums and itineraries, but from everyday habits — focaccia at seven in the morning, fish bought fresh at the market, pesto made at home on Thursday. Mercato Orientale is one of the places where this way of being Genoese shows itself most clearly.

Entering it with curiosity, without haste, without a rigid shopping list, is already a way of understanding Genoa. The city reveals itself through its smells and flavors even before it reveals itself through its architecture. Anyone who has spent an hour at Mercato Orientale knows something about Genoa that cannot be found in any tourist guide.

If you want to explore everything Genoa has to offer from a gastronomic and cultural perspective, our Discover Genoa page brings together constantly updated events, appointments, and tips. And if you’re planning a stay, our residences in the heart of the city put you a stone’s throw from this and all the other most authentic corners of a city that, when it shows itself unfiltered, still knows how to surprise.

Genoa doesn’t tell its story. It tastes it. And Mercato Orientale is the right place to begin.