Rome Shopping Hours

According to Rick Steves' Rome guide book shopping hours in Rome are 9:00 am-1:00 pm and 04:00-7:00 pm. Some shops close Saturday afternoon in the summer. He doesn't mention whether they are open on Sunday - I imagine department stores and boutiques may not be. Open air markets open every morning 7 am - 1 pm except Sunday. Get a good guidebook for best information on such questions as opening hours for the sites, restaurants etc.

Just out of curiosity, I checked the websites for COIN (sort of like Target or K-Mart), La Rinascente (a relatively upscale department store) and UPIM (in between the other two, I believe). For all of them, their Rome stores are open on Sundays, pretty long hours like 9 or 10 AM through 7 or 8 PM, and without a midday closing. So, if all else fails, you can go to one of these stores on a Sunday. I haven't been to Rome since the last 1990's, but one of my most vivid memories is of the ferocity of the midday store closing. From 1 to 4 PM, all stores were not only closed, but had full opaque metal shutters over their entrances; you couldn't even tell they were stores, because they looked like abandoned buildings. So, the shopping streets resembled some post-apocalypse sci-fi movie. Then, at 4 PM, they came to life again. Large grocery stores and department stores stayed open, but these weren't in the very center (Piazza Navona, Campo dei Fiori, Spanish Steps areas). My friend still has, and uses, a sweater he got from STANDA, another inexpensive department store, but Wikipedia informs me that it closed over 10 years ago now. I really do have to get back to Rome <g>.

Thanks for the replies !!!

We are in Rome this week...every day was crowded crowded crowded with 99% of the stores open all day. I never noticed a siesta time (was almost wishing for one) but some of the smaller eateries may have closed a bit earlier during the week. It definitely was NOT what I had expected from reading the books and posts. The city never stopped!