Monte Testaccio: The Mountain of Broken Jars
Why is it significant?
Stand at the foot of the grassy mound behind the fence and look closely where the earth has crumbled away. What you take for stones are fragments of terracotta, thousands upon thousands of them, curved and reddish.
Key Facts
| Place | Monte Testaccio: The Mountain of Broken Jars |
|---|---|
| Address | Via di Monte Testaccio, 00153 Roma RM, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.87630, 12.47500 |
| Part of Walk | The Keyhole and the Amphora Hill: Aventine Secrets & Testaccio's Roman Soul |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand at the foot of the grassy mound behind the fence and look closely where the earth has crumbled away. What you take for stones are fragments of terracotta, thousands upon thousands of them, curved and reddish. This hill, about thirty-five metres high and nearly a kilometre around, is made of nothing but broken pots.
Monte Testaccio, whose name comes from testae, the Latin for potsherds, contains the remains of an estimated fifty million amphorae. Almost all of them came from one place: the province of Baetica, today's Andalusia in southern Spain, and almost all of them carried one thing... olive oil. For about two and a half centuries, from the age of Augustus to the middle of the third century, Rome imported oil on an industrial scale, and the empty jars ended up here.
Why not reuse them? Because oil soaks into the clay and turns rancid; a used oil jar was worthless. So workers carried them up the slope, smashed them and arranged the pieces in neat terraces, sprinkling them with lime to kill the smell. Many shards still carry stamps and painted inscriptions: the producer, the weight, the officials who checked them. Archaeologists read this hill like the account books of the Roman empire.
In the Middle Ages the Romans found other uses for their mountain. During carnival, they held games on the top, and the most notorious involved carts loaded with pigs sent rolling down the slope, the crowd scrambling for the meat at the bottom. Later, people discovered that caves dug into the base stayed cool all year, perfect for storing wine. Walk around the hill and you will see that those cellars are now trattorias, bars and nightclubs, built right into the shards.
When you eat in one of them, look at the back wall. Sometimes it is a pane of glass, and behind it, glowing under a lamp, two thousand years of rubbish from the empire. Next, walk toward the long nineteenth-century building at the end of the street, the place that gave Rome its most famous dishes.