The famous Privoz Market—noisy, slightly crooked, and ethnically diverse—was yet another visiting card of both old and new Odessa. Here today, as a hundred years ago, untranslatable Odessa jokes arise and several generations of satirists have found inspiration. The other main prerevolutionary bazaars—the Old and New—were stationary and with foundations: they had stone pavilions, stalls, stores, and warehouses. For many decades the Privoz was only a square where farmers sold their goods from carts and wagons. The Russian word "privozit'" means "to bring by transport, and local agricultural regions brought their wares to the Privoz.

   Gradually the market became so popular that people started to construct stone and wooden buildings. Eventually an architectural glory, the Fruit Passage, was built. The sales statistics at Privoz show that in the late nineteenth century Odessa annually consumed 1,132,800 chickens and 40 million eggs.

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    Although the French, Swiss, British, and Italians did not form a large percentage of the population, they had a strong cultural influence. The Italian influence is perhaps the most obvious. In the first decades of the nineteenth century. Italian was taught in all the Odessa schools. Signs with names of streets,stores, and cafes were written in Russian and Italian. The Italian
casino of Theater Square was the traditional meeting place of exporters. Italian navigators had the priority in creating sea charts guaranteeing the safety of sea trading.

   Memoirs show that even the coachmen had a vast knowledge of popular Italian  opera arias, and that the melodies of Rossini and Cimarosa could be heard coining from the mouths of ordinary men on the street. The Italians also traded in wines, imported marble, olive oil, dried fruit, and other products. Thev worked as brokers at the stock exchange. In the first half of the nineteenth century they baked bread and manufactured macaroni, galettes, sausages, and confectionery. Most of the revered architects of Odessa were Italian: the Frapolli brothers, Boffo. Toricelli, Morandi. and Bcrnardazzi. The same holds for sculptors and marble workers: Torini and Menzione. Italians taught music and singing and there were manv Italian painters in Odessa.