Kiosks, here and across Europe, have increasingly become like mini-shopping malls, to a degree that would surprise even New Yorkers accustomed to buying sodas and candy from corner newsstands. Customers hunting for the latest issue of Corriere dello Sport can also find dinner plates and encyclopedias, which are shoehorned among copies of Chinese Vogue, Der Spiegel and The Economist. Plastic food containers, toy Vespas and CDs featuring obscure chamber music ensembles or weepy Italian pop crooners compete for space with the usual postcards, guidebooks, weight loss DVDs like "SOS Cellulite" and beefcake calendars of Roman priests.

The stands start out more or less the same. But artists have proved for eons that in sameness there can be infinite variety.

So, too, have Italian news agents.

What results, almost surreptitiously, makes a kind of homely cousin to the city's famous architecture. Filippo de Angelis runs the newsstand beside the Piazza della Minerva. He opts for a relatively classic display of publications. His neatnik approach suits the backdrop of the facade of the basilica across the square, albeit he didn't have that in mind, he said, when, drowsily, he laid out his various rows of magazines and boxes of plastic toys before 6 in the morning. Hangdog and deadpan, he is a former baker. He took over the kiosk two years ago.

"It used to be just me and wheat," is how he put it. One recent morning, under a hot sun, the square echoed with swarms of tourists trailing chatty guides. Mr. de Angelis demurred at the suggestion that his stand was elegant, though he did allow as how the DVDs, draped in casual ranks like confetti from the front of the stand, had been selected specially by him.

Fassbinder and Pasolini dangled over a flush of gossip magazines.

At the Campo de' Fiori nearby, Fabrizio Zanchi, a gregarious man, was overseeing the sprawling kiosk where he works, with a marble-floor interior, no less. Narrow shelves rise to the forest green ceiling like angels toward heaven in a fresco by Pietro da Cortona. Except, in lieu of angels, the shelves heaved with piles of Sudoku puzzlers, knockoff Barbie dolls, tidy balls of wool and dusty books.

Mr. Zanchi is a former hotelier, he said, from São Paolo, who moved here seven years ago and came to work at the stand after that. Being Brazilian, he likes a little ha-cha-cha. To wit, he appreciates the procession of fashion glossies from France, Spain and China that spill ostentatiously toward the flower and fruit stands nearby. Magazine racks fan halfway around the stall. Side-view mirrors attached to the rack of magazines directly in front of the stand, which permit Mr. Zanchi to see around the booth, provide a vaguely Rococo touch.

"It's true," he boasted, in response to a remark that the kiosk looked artful. Like an admiral on the bridge of a battleship, Mr. Zanchi surveyed from his cramped booth a sea of yachting journals, home decorating magazines and oddball gewgaws stretching before him. "I feel surrounded by culture," he said.

The era when the presence of Time, Newsweek and Le Monde lent European kiosks an air of cosmopolitan glamour died with humane coach-class air travel and paparazzi wielding flashbulbs on the Via Veneto. The kiosk in "The Third Man," through which Orson Welles's character suddenly vanishes into Vienna's sewer system, seems as much a relic of Old World mystery and charm as feathered felt hats and fencing scars.

Once upon a time, kiosks in Madrid hawked hard-core pornography and sold single cigarettes for a peseta. Then a French company bought up the Spanish kiosks, replacing them with imitations of the Belle Époque-like versions in Paris but plastered with bears (the Madrid symbol) instead of Eiffel Towers. Madrileños weren't amused. Today a few kiosks in Paris, which all peddle the same glossy posters of semi-naked models advertising magazine articles about human sexuality, proffer odd volumes by Sartre or Habermas to court American tourists.

But distinctions of national identity are subtler to discern these days. Everywhere kiosks are jammed with nearly the same things — 3,000 items in total, by Mr. de Angelis's estimate; 20,000, by Mr. Zanchi's.

Every night the proverbial 10 pounds of mortadella must be stuffed into a one-pound casing: all those magazines, newspapers and other material must somehow fit inside the locked kiosks.

Massimo Fioretti runs the stand between the Pantheon and Sant'Eustachio. He described packing up as a virtual military maneuver; if he forgets his house keys inside, he'll leave them rather than unpack. After 15 years on the job, he misses the days when his stand was a place where neighbors left messages for one another and lingered to chat over the daily newspapers. Tourism, the Web, mobile phones and real estate values that have priced out residents have gradually done all that in at his corner.

"Eventually we'll just sell gadgets," Mr. Fioretti said with a sigh.

But his newsstand, visually speaking, remains a model of the art form, an orderly, beckoning cornucopia of maps, guides, reading glasses, clocks, diaries, souvenir medallions, playing cards and other tourist paraphernalia, amid the various archaeology numbers, foreign newsweeklies, lads' magazines ("they don't sell like they used to," he noted gravely) and Italian dailies. High Baroque, you might call the kiosk.

He takes pride in the somber opulence of his stand, even while admitting that he's overwhelmed by the growing volume of texts, none of which he said he actually read. Keeping track of them is labor enough.

As proof, after asking a reporter to repeat the name of the newspaper he works for, Mr. Fioretti nodded. Yes, he even stocks the Sunday New York Times, a single copy a week, at a whopping cost of $15.

"What is in there?" he inquired sincerely, marveling at the size of the thing.

Then he rolled his eyes.

"It doesn't exactly sell like hotcakes," he added.

Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting.