A broad piazza, known to the elder Florentine writers as the Mercato Vecchio. This piazza, though the scene of a provision market from time immemorial, had not been shunned as a place of residence by Florentine wealth. In the early decades of the fifteenth century, the Medici and other powerful families had their houses there... And high on a pillar in the centre of the place, a venerable pillar, fetched from the Church of San Giovanni, stood Donatello's stone statue of Plenty, with a fountain near it, where, says old Pucci, the good wives of the market freshened their utensils and their throats also. - Romola