The Testaccio Food Story: The Port, the Mound and the Slaughterhouse

Testaccio eats the way it does because of three things that happened on this riverbank: a port that unloaded the empire's olive oil, a hill built out of the jars it came in, and a slaughterhouse that paid its workers in offal. Everything on a plate here follows from those. If you would rather taste the argument than read it, start with the best Testaccio food tour listings.

The Emporium, Rome's river port

From the first century AD the flat ground between the Aventine and the Tiber was built up as the Emporium, the port that fed the city once the old Forum Boarium landing had been outgrown. It reached its height under Trajan in the second century: a long travertine quay, rows of warehouses over a cryptoporticus, offices on the upper floors. Grain, wine, garum and above all olive oil came ashore here from Spain, North Africa and the Aegean.

By the fourth century it had been abandoned. It silted over and disappeared until the nineteenth century brought it back to light. What you can see of it today is fragmentary. The shape of the quarter, though, is entirely its doing: Testaccio is flat because a port needs flat ground, and it sits here because this is where the ships stopped.

How a mountain of amphorae happened

Olive oil travelled in earthenware jars that could not be reused: the oil soaked into the clay and went rancid. So the jars were emptied at the quay, carried a short distance inland, broken to a pattern, limed and stacked in courses.

Over roughly a century and a half of that, the result was a hill. Most of the stacking happened between about 140 AD and the middle of the third century.

Monte dei Cocci is about a kilometre round and holds something like 580,000 cubic metres of material over two hectares. It is the reason the rione has its name: testa is a potsherd. Roma Capitale describes what is in it as millions of fragments, and stops there. If you want to stand on it, you will need to book — things to do in Testaccio has the number.

Two official heights, and why both stand

Ask how tall the mound is and you get two answers, both from official Roman bodies. The Sovrintendenza Capitolina's own monument page gives 54 metres. A Roma Capitale news page gives about 35 metres. Both give the circumference as roughly a kilometre, so they are describing the same hill.

The likeliest explanation is that the two are measuring different things. One gives the mound's height above the surrounding street; the other gives the summit's elevation above sea level, on ground that already sits fifteen to twenty metres up near the Tiber. Neither source says so. Until one does, the honest answer is to print both figures and name the body behind each — which is what every page here does.

The rione the 1880s built

When Rome became the capital of Italy in 1870 the city needed housing. Rione XX was laid out on the port plain in the following decade as a purpose-built working-class quarter: regular blocks, inner courtyards, and flats for the families of men who worked the river and, from 1891, the slaughterhouse. You can still read that plan on the ground. The streets run straight, the blocks are uniform, and Piazza Testaccio sits at the centre where the market traded in the open until 2012.

It matters for what you eat. The quarter was poor and self-contained, and its cooking answered that: cheap cuts, hard cheese, dried pasta and whatever the market had that morning.

The Mattatoio, 1891 to 1975

Gioacchino Ersoch's slaughterhouse was built between 1888 and 1891, across about 25,000 square metres at the foot of Monte dei Cocci. It worked for the best part of a century before closing in 1975 and moving out of the city. In its working life it employed a large part of the rione. Its buildings now hold contemporary art, an architecture faculty and a performance space, and you can walk into all three.

Quinto quarto, and the dishes it left

Divide an animal into four quarters and there is a fifth left over: the offal, the head, the tail and the feet. The vaccinari who worked at the Mattatoio were paid partly in that fifth quarter, because the market considered it worthless. Roman cooking turned it into the dishes the city is now known for — coda alla vaccinara, trippa alla romana, coratella, pajata. That story is told by food writers rather than by a ministry. Take it as the tradition Rome tells about itself, not as an archival fact.

You do not have to eat any of it. The same walks pour pecorino, guanciale, pasta, pizza and gelato in quantity, and what to eat in Testaccio says which listings put what in front of you.

What survives on the plate

Four pasta dishes come out of this quarter's larder, and they are variations on one another. Gricia is guanciale and pecorino. Cacio e pepe drops the guanciale for pepper. Amatriciana adds tomato to the gricia, and carbonara adds egg. All four need the same two ingredients, both bought at the market, and you will meet all four on the tables the food walks stop at. That is the whole argument of this quarter, in four plates.