Testaccio is Rome's youngest rione - made an official historic district only in 1921 - but its identity is one of the oldest in the city. The neighbourhood occupies the spot of the ancient Emporium, Rome's commercial river-port from the 2nd century BC onwards. The goods coming up the Tiber from Ostia - olive oil, wine, grain, marble, garum (the fish-sauce Romans put on everything) - were unloaded here. The amphorae that brought the goods were broken and dumped. Two thousand years later, the broken pottery is still here - in the form of Monte Testaccio, a 35-metre artificial hill made of 53 million amphora shards, sitting incongruously in the middle of a working-class Roman neighbourhood. The food culture that grew up around the slaughterhouse and the port has stayed too. Testaccio is one of the only Roman neighbourhoods where the working-class identity survives the gentrification.
The Emporium and the amphora hill
From 193 BC to about 250 AD the area now called Testaccio was Rome's main river-port. Ships from Ostia (10 km west, at the mouth of the Tiber) would unload here at the Emporium. The cargo was unloaded onto stone warehouses (some of which are partially excavated south of the Pyramid). Olive oil came in distinctive flat-bottomed Roman amphorae - the Dressel 20 type, made primarily in Spanish Baetica (modern Andalusia) and Africa Proconsularis (modern Tunisia). Olive oil is one of the few liquids that can't be stored in barrels (it goes rancid quickly without ceramic protection), so each amphora was single-use - filled in Spain, sailed to Rome, emptied, broken, dumped.
The amphora dump grew steadily for four centuries. Archaeologists estimate Monte Testaccio contains about 53 million amphorae. Each amphora carried stamped letters (tituli picti) recording the supplier, the year, the weight, and sometimes the inspector - making Monte Testaccio one of the most concentrated single sources of Roman trade-stamp data ever excavated. The hill is named after the amphora shards themselves: testae in Latin means "potsherds". The "Monte" became a fixture of the medieval Roman landscape and was eventually built around as the city expanded south.
The Pyramid of Cestius
The 36-metre marble-faced pyramid on what is now Piazza di Porta San Paolo was built between 18 and 12 BC as the tomb of Gaius Cestius - a Roman praetor and magistrate of the religious college responsible for the public banquets given to the gods. He died in 12 BC, leaving in his will that his tomb must be completed within 330 days; the pyramid was finished on time. Egyptian pyramid-style was briefly fashionable after Augustus's 30 BC annexation of Egypt; there were originally several pyramidal Roman tombs (another, the much larger Pyramid of Romulus, was demolished in the medieval period). The Cestius pyramid survives because it was incorporated into the Aurelian Walls (271-275 AD) - the late-Roman city walls that turned the pyramid into a defensive bastion. The interior chamber, painted with 1st-century-BC Roman murals, is open Saturdays only (€8, book ahead). The exterior is always visible from Piazza di Porta San Paolo. Free.
The Cimitero Acattolico
The Non-Catholic Cemetery for Foreigners - or, formally, the Cimitero Acattolico di Roma - opened in 1716 as a burial place for Protestant Northern Europeans who died in Rome and could not be buried in consecrated Catholic ground. The cemetery sits directly against the Aurelian Walls, with the Pyramid of Cestius rising behind it, framed by cypresses and umbrella pines.
John Keats died in Rome on 23 February 1821 (in the apartment at 26 Piazza di Spagna; see the Trevi/Spanish Steps page) and was buried in the cemetery three days later. He had asked that his gravestone bear no name, only the words "Here lies one whose name was writ in water". The headstone bears those words plus the longer inscription added by his friend Joseph Severn, the painter who cared for him to the end. Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned off the Italian coast on 8 July 1822, aged 29; his body was cremated on the beach near La Spezia (Lord Byron and Edward Trelawny attended the cremation; the heart was reportedly retrieved unburned from the pyre by Trelawny and given to Shelley's widow Mary). Shelley's ashes were buried in the cemetery's upper section in 1823; his heart, kept by Mary Shelley for years, was eventually placed in the family vault.
Other burials: Antonio Gramsci (Italian Communist philosopher, 1937), August von Goethe (the poet's son), the painter Joseph Severn, the writer Henry James Pye, John Cabot University's founders, Carlo Emilio Gadda (the novelist). The cemetery is small - about 2 hectares - and consciously preserved as a wild-Romantic landscape: ivy on the walls, cypresses, marble fragments. Free entry; suggested donation €5. Daily 09:00-17:00 (winter) or 18:00 (summer). One of the most atmospheric small cemeteries in Europe.
The Mattatoio and the working-class neighbourhood
The modern neighbourhood of Testaccio was developed from 1873 onwards. The unified Italian state needed to industrialise; Testaccio - close to the river, close to the railway (the Porta San Paolo station opened 1865), with cheap land - was earmarked for the city's gas works, the central slaughterhouse, the railway goods yards. Workers' housing followed: the long four-storey apartment blocks (case popolari) you still see along Via Galvani, Via Marmorata and Via Mastro Giorgio were built 1880s-1920s for slaughterhouse, port and railway workers. The neighbourhood became densely working-class and stayed that way through most of the 20th century.
The Mattatoio - the central municipal slaughterhouse on Piazza Orazio Giustiniani - was the neighbourhood's largest single employer. Built 1888-1891 by Gioacchino Ersoch in a remarkable industrial brick-and-iron architecture (considered one of Europe's finest 19th-century industrial buildings), it processed about 1,500 cattle and 4,000 sheep per day at peak. The slaughterhouse closed in 1975 when production moved to a modern facility outside the city. The vast brick complex sat empty through the 1980s; from the 1990s onwards it was gradually converted into a cultural centre. Today it houses MACRO Testaccio (the contemporary art branch of the Macro museum, free admission), the architecture and design school of Roma Tre university, the Pelanda exhibition space, a small concert hall, and various artist-residency programmes. Free to walk through the courtyards; the industrial-brick architecture is the visit.
The quinto quarto tradition
The slaughterhouse workers were paid partly in cash and partly in cuts of meat - specifically the quinto quarto, the "fifth quarter", the offal that the wealthier Roman classes wouldn't buy. The workers' wives turned the offal into the dishes that became canonical Roman cuisine: coda alla vaccinara (oxtail stew), trippa alla romana (tripe with tomato and mint), pajata (intestine-of-suckling-calf, with the milk still inside, stewed in tomato), and animelle (sweetbreads). The trattorias of Testaccio - founded by slaughterhouse-worker families - still serve these dishes. Checchino dal 1887 (Via di Monte Testaccio 30) is the historical address, the family kitchen of the Lattanzi family for five generations. Other quinto-quarto-strong addresses: Trattoria Felice, Flavio al Velavevodetto, the older menus at Da Bucatino.
The food market and the modern Testaccio
The old Testaccio Market (built 1926, in the centre of the neighbourhood) closed in 2012 and a new market hall opened simultaneously at Via Galvani 30. The new market has about 100 stalls - fresh fish, meat, produce, cheese, oil, plus a dozen lunch-counter stalls (Mordi & Vai for stuffed sandwiches, Dol for cheese plates, Le Mani in Pasta for fresh pasta, supplì from various corners). It is cleaner and better-organised than Campo de' Fiori or Mercato Trionfale; the food quality is consistently higher; the tourist density is lower. Open Monday-Saturday 07:00-15:30. The market is the neighbourhood's social heart, and the food-tour heart for visitors.
The 1990s also brought the nightclubs. The cave-spaces dug into the base of Monte Testaccio - originally used as wine cellars by the slaughterhouse workers - were converted into clubs from the 1980s onwards. Akab, Caruso, L'Alibi, Coyote - the perimeter of Monte Testaccio became Rome's main club strip for about 20 years. The scene has thinned in the 2010s (gentrification, rising rents, the rise of Pigneto and Ostiense as alternative night neighbourhoods) but several clubs still operate Thursday-Saturday 23:00-04:00. The contrast between the daytime trattoria-and-market identity and the nighttime club-strip identity is the modern Testaccio in microcosm.
