In the Florentine neighborhood of San Lorenzo, the streets are cluttered with rickety booths where industrious locals peddle everything from kitschy souvenirs to hand-painted porcelain, counterfeit jeans to fine leather, silk scarves to silkscreened t-shirts. Rising above the fray on one side of the bazaar is the Church of San Lorenzo, the parish church of the mighty House of Medici, whose tombs in an adjoining chapel are adorned with the androgynous marble figures of Dawn and Night carved by Michelangelo to watch over his patrons' bones. Just around the corner from this monument of death, another monument rises, a far more modern affair of stone and wrought-iron, a giant hall erected to the life of Tuscany and its greatest living legacy: its food.

The Mercato Centrale is painted in lively greens and reds, like a Christmas present begging to be discovered. It is open every day but Sunday, from 7 am to 2 pm, and during those hours it is packed with bounty of the Tuscan countryside: produce, cheeses, fresh and cured meats, fresh seafood, and wine. My unabashed carnivorousness, having been tested in the alleys of Manhattan's Chinatown, reveled in the butchery of the Mercato Centrale. It is the season of the spring lamb in Italy, when in the run-up to Easter milk-fed lambs of just a few weeks age are slaughtered for their incomparably tender meat. So special are these animals that the Italians have a separate word for them; while lamb is simply agnello, a baby lamb is abbacchio (from abbattere, meaning to butcher). A whole abbacchio is probably only slightly larger in total volume than your Thanksgiving Turkey, and may even have less edible flesh. But they are such a prize, the butchers of Florence display them proudly.

Lamb is not the only specialty of the Florentine butcher. My search for pigs' feet would have gone much more smoothly here. You will find no fussy pre-marinated pork loins here; pigs are about more than just chops and roasts. No part of the pig is wasted:

In this picture you can find the hearts, ears, kidneys, livers, lungs, feet, stomachs, tails, and knuckles of pigs: parts that in America would never find their way to a grocer's meat case. If looking on these viscera disgusts you, consider the assembly-line animal husbandry that gave you your last porkchop: bringing millions of animals into being only to live miserable lives and then have much of their bodies discarded. You can tell that these butchers knew their animals - or at least the farmers who raised them - in life as well as they know them in death. I can only imagine that this fellow was happier than most American hogs before he met with the knife.