Montreal Layover Near Jean-Talon Market

Jean-Talon Market, the open-air produce market at the heart of Montreal’s Little Italy, has traded on the same block since 1933 and costs nothing to walk through, with a parish church two streets away that has Mussolini painted across its apse.

Jean-Talon Market has traded on the same block since 1933

Camillien Houde, the mayor whose name is on the road over Mount Royal, opened it in May 1933 as the Marché du Nord, the northern market, and it kept that name for fifty years before the city renamed it in 1983 after Jean Talon, the first intendant of New France. It sits at 7070 avenue Henri-Julien and is among the largest open-air markets in North America.

Summer is when it earns that description: more than 300 vendors take the aisles, and the stalls run to Quebec strawberries, corn by the dozen, maple everything, cheese counters, charcuterie and fish. Doors are 8am to 6pm Monday to Saturday and 8am to 5pm on Sunday. From around October most of it retreats under cover and what stays outside is a much smaller operation, so the market you get in February is not the one in the photographs. The aisles run narrow between stall fronts with crates stacked out into the walkway, and there is nowhere to stand a suitcase clear of them.

A 1931 fresco in the Madonna della Difesa church puts Mussolini on horseback

Italian families who settled these streets in the early twentieth century built the church, to a design by Roch Montbriant working with the artist Guido Nincheri, and its red brick front carries a gilded mosaic of the Virgin set into the gable.

Nincheri painted the apse in 1931 with a scene marking the Lateran Treaty, the 1929 agreement that made Vatican City a sovereign state, and among the figures attending it is Benito Mussolini, on a horse. At the time nobody in Montreal read that as remarkable. It aged badly, and Nincheri himself was interned during the Second World War as an Italian national; what helped get him out was his original sketch for the commission, which had contained no Mussolini at all. The church is free to walk into and it is the single strangest ten minutes available within a short walk of a produce market.

The airport bus does not come this far north

Line 747 keeps to downtown and the western corridor, so nothing here connects to it directly. The nearest metro station sits three street corners from the market doors, which is about as short an approach as any of Montreal’s outlying stops offer, and from there the metro runs across to where line 747 leaves for Montréal-Trudeau International Airport (YUL), 24 hours a day, every ten to twenty minutes, at CA$11.25, a fare that then covers the rest of the network for 24 hours.

That bus is about 30 to 35 minutes from Lionel-Groulx or 45 to 70 minutes on the full run from Berri-UQAM, riding time only, so allow an hour and a quarter from the market to the terminal doors and be there three hours before an international flight. This corner is a long way north of everything the Montreal layover guide covers, so treat the two as alternatives rather than a combined afternoon; the Berri coach station version of this trip sits between the two.

Boulevard Saint-Laurent runs through the middle of Little Italy

The boulevard is the neighbourhood’s long axis, and the Italian stretch of it is coffee bars with espresso machines older than most of the customers, importers selling olive oil by the tin, and restaurants that have stayed in the same families across generations.

It is a low-rise, unhurried street with none of the old town’s foot traffic, which is most of the appeal. If the plan is to eat properly rather than graze the market stalls, this is where to do it, and it stays busy into the evening long after the market aisles have been swept.