ROME’S EIGHTH hill, Monte Testaccio, is often overlooked since, quite literally, it is an ancient rubbish heap. This 36m-high bramble-covered mound is a quirky legacy of the commercial might of the Roman empire. What appears to be a large hill is in fact a collection of pieces of broken amphorae dumped here during the port’s glory days.
The jars held olive oil from Betica (that’s Andalusia today) and north Africa. It is thought there are something like 40 million fragments of the earthenware vessels contributing to its impressive bulk, which these days is topped by a large Christian cross. In the Middle Ages, Monte Testaccio and the area below it were the venue for pre-Lenten celebrations, with the horse races and religious pageants of the nobility vying with the less-refined sport of the people. Pigs, bulls and wild boar were packed into carts at the top of the hill and sent careering down; survivors of the impact were finished off with spears. Jews, too, were subjected to indignities of all sorts.
Taverns were bored into the flanks of the hill in the 17th century. Today, Rome’s liveliest clubs and restaurants are here, many of them with glass rear walls that reveal the clay-pot innards of the hill.
The bizarre statue of a winged hero slaughtering an ox atop the Mattatoio (slaughterhouse) leaves little doubt about its mission. The 24-acre complex, hailed as Europe’s most advanced abattoir when it opened in 1891, extends from the Tiber to Monte Testaccio, and coped with an eightfold increase in the city’s population. It was the source of meat for the whole of central Italy and provided Testaccio’s residents with work until 1975. For decades, bickering between politicians and planners left the structure in picturesque abandon: now it has been reclaimed and transformed into spaces for projects and exhibitions, as well as an outpost of the Macro gallery.
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