The Keyhole and the Amphora Hill: Aventine Secrets & Testaccio's Roman Soul

From the Mouth of Truth to a hill made of fifty million broken jars: a quiet hilltop of orange trees and knights, then the working-class quarter that invented Roman soul food

Rome · 11 stops · 26 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Mouth of Truth & Santa Maria in Cosmedin

Piazza della Bocca della Verità 18, 00186 Roma RM, Italy

Look into the portico of the little brick church with the slender bell tower, and you will see a queue of people waiting to put their hand into the mouth of a giant marble face. Its eyes are hollow, its lips are open, and the beard flows down like water... which is a clue, because that is probably exactly what it once was.

The Bocca della Verità, the Mouth of Truth, is a disc of marble about a metre and three quarters across. Most archaeologists think it began life as an ancient drain cover, maybe from the temple of Hercules a few steps away, the face of a river god or of Oceanus through whose mouth rainwater disappeared. It only arrived in this portico in 1632. But by then, Romans had been telling stories about it for centuries.

The legend says that if you tell a lie with your hand inside the mouth, it will bite it off. Medieval husbands supposedly brought suspicious wives here to swear their fidelity. And in the film Roman Holiday, in 1953, Gregory Peck pulled his arm out with the hand hidden in his sleeve. The story goes that he had kept the trick from Audrey Hepburn... and that the scream you hear in the film is real.

Now step back and look at the church itself, Santa Maria in Cosmedin. In the eighth century this was the church of the Greek community, refugees from the Byzantine East, and the strange word Cosmedin comes from the Greek for ornament. Inside, the floor is a carpet of cut marble in the Cosmati style, and in a side chapel rests a skull crowned with flowers, venerated as that of Saint Valentine. Yes... that Saint Valentine.

All around you lay the Forum Boarium, the ancient cattle market, where boats from the river unloaded and Rome first grew rich on trade. Two temples from that age still stand across the road, almost untouched. Now cross the square and head south, along the road that leads to the greatest stadium the ancient world ever built.
2. Circus Maximus: The Racetrack of Two Hundred Thousand

Via del Circo Massimo, 00186 Roma RM, Italy

Stand at the edge of this long, empty valley of grass and gravel and let your eyes run all the way down to the far end, more than six hundred metres away. On your left, the brick ruins of the emperors' palaces on the Palatine. On your right, the green slope of the Aventine. Between them, nothing... and once, everything.

This was the Circus Maximus, the biggest entertainment venue ever built in the ancient world. Ancient writers claimed it held a quarter of a million people. Even modern, cautious estimates speak of around a hundred and fifty thousand... more than any stadium on earth today. The emperor watched from his palace on the hill, and the crowd watched him back.

Chariot racing was Rome's true obsession. The teams were known by their colours, the Reds, the Whites, the Greens and the Blues, and fans were loyal to a colour for life, betting, brawling and even burying curse tablets to cripple the rival horses. The greatest star of them all was a charioteer from Spain called Gaius Appuleius Diocles. Over a twenty-four year career he won more than fourteen hundred races and earned around thirty-five million sesterces, a fortune that makes him, by some reckonings, the best-paid athlete in history.

Down the middle of the track ran a long central barrier, the spina, decorated with statues, shrines and two Egyptian obelisks. Those obelisks did not vanish. One now stands in Piazza del Popolo, the other in front of the Lateran basilica... you may well walk past them later in your stay without knowing they once watched chariots crash.

It was also here, in the wooden shops at the eastern end of the circus, that a fire broke out one summer night in the year 64. It burned for days and destroyed much of the city, and it gave the emperor Nero the space for his golden palace. The last races were held here around 549, under a Gothic king. Today the valley fills again only for concerts and for football victories. Walk to the foot of the Aventine slope, where a garden hides a story that has nothing to do with chariots.
3. Roseto Comunale: The Rose Garden Shaped Like a Menorah

Via di Valle Murcia 6, 00153 Roma RM, Italy

Look through the railings at the terraces climbing the slope of the hill. In spring they explode with colour, more than a thousand varieties of roses from all over the world. But before you look at the flowers, look at the paths between them. Seen from above, they draw a shape: a seven-branched candelabrum, a menorah.

That is not decoration for its own sake. At the entrance stand two stone tablets in the shape of the Tables of the Law. From 1645 until the twentieth century, this slope was the cemetery of the Jews of Rome. The community, locked inside the ghetto by papal decree for three centuries, was allowed to bury its dead here, outside the walls of the ghetto but under strict rules. For long periods, tombstones bearing names were forbidden.

In 1934, the regime decided to cut a grand new road along the Circus Maximus. The cemetery was in the way. The graves were moved to the large municipal cemetery of Verano, and the hillside was left bare. A few years later came the racial laws, the deportations, and the darkest chapter in the history of Roman Jews.

When the city decided to place its new rose garden here after the war, the Jewish community agreed on one condition: that the memory of what this ground had been should never be erased. And so the paths were drawn as a menorah. Every year, a competition crowns the most beautiful new rose in the world, and visitors walk among the petals along the arms of a sacred lamp, often without knowing it.

Long before any of this, ancient writers placed a temple to Flora, goddess of flowers, on the slopes near the Circus. Whether by accident or by design, the flowers have come back. The garden opens only in its seasons, mostly in spring, but the shape is there all year round. Now take the steep little lane called Clivo dei Publicii up the hill. At the top, the city falls quiet.
4. Santa Sabina & the Orange Garden

Piazza Pietro d'Illiria 1, 00153 Roma RM, Italy

Walk through the gate into the garden, down the avenue of bitter orange trees, and keep going until you reach the parapet. There it is: the whole of Rome spread across the river, the domes floating above the roofs, and on the horizon, the great dome of Saint Peter's. Romans call this the Giardino degli Aranci, the Orange Garden, and they bring their first dates here.

Under your feet are the foundations of a medieval fortress of the Savelli family, the barons who once controlled this hill. The garden itself is young, laid out in 1932. But why oranges? For that, walk back to the church right next door, Santa Sabina, built in the fifth century and still almost exactly as it was.

Before you go in, look at the doors. They are made of cypress wood, carved around the year 430, and among their small panels is one of the oldest surviving images of the Crucifixion anywhere in the world. Early Christians hesitated to show Christ on the cross, the death of a slave. Here, for one of the first times, someone dared. Inside, light falls through windows of thin selenite, soft as candlelight, onto twenty-four ancient columns.

In 1219, the pope gave this church to a Spanish preacher called Dominic, the founder of the Dominican order. Dominic is said to have brought an orange seedling from Spain and planted it in the cloister, the first sweet orange tree in Italy, so the story goes. Through a small hole in the wall of the portico you can still glimpse an orange tree growing in the same spot. And look for a round black stone on a little column inside: the Lapis Diaboli, the devil's stone, which the devil supposedly hurled at Dominic while he prayed... and missed.

The monks who live here today still belong to Dominic's order; the master of the whole order has his seat here. Leave the church and continue along the quiet street to the end. There is a green door there with a famous little hole in it, and a queue of people bending down to look through.
5. The Knights of Malta Keyhole

Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta 3, 00153 Roma RM, Italy

Join the line in front of the big green door, wait your turn, and then bend down and put your eye to the keyhole. Through a tunnel of clipped hedges, perfectly centred, the dome of Saint Peter's floats in the distance, small and bright like a jewel in a box. Take your time. Everyone gasps the first time.

Behind this door lies the Roman priory of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, the knights founded in Jerusalem at the time of the Crusades to care for pilgrims, who later ruled Rhodes and then Malta. The order has no territory of its own today, yet it issues passports, has diplomatic relations with dozens of countries, and its property here enjoys extraterritorial status. Which is why Romans like to say that through this tiny hole you see three states at once: the knights' garden, Italy, and the Vatican.

Now turn around and look at the square itself. The walls are covered with obelisks, little shields, ships' prows, swords and trophies, like a stage set carved in stucco. It was designed in the 1760s by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the engraver whose dark, imaginary prisons and vast Roman ruins influenced architects across Europe. This square and the little church behind the door are the only architecture he ever actually built.

And he never left. Piranesi was buried in that church, Santa Maria del Priorato, in 1778, and a statue of him stands over his tomb. He spent his life drawing an imaginary Rome even grander than the real one... and ended up resting a few metres from the one view that makes everyone fall silent.

Was the keyhole designed for that view? Nobody can prove it. The avenue of the garden may simply have been planted on the axis of the door. But in Rome, coincidences rarely look like coincidences. From here, the hill drops down toward the river and into a very different world. Follow the road downhill, past the Benedictine abbey of Sant'Anselmo, into Testaccio, the neighbourhood that fed Rome.
6. Piazza Testaccio & the Fountain of the Amphorae

Piazza Testaccio, 00153 Roma RM, Italy

Stand by the fountain in the middle of the square, a pyramid of stone jars stacked on top of each other with water trickling from their mouths. Around you, washing hangs from the balconies of tall ochre apartment blocks, old men argue on the benches and children chase pigeons. This is Testaccio, and it is about as Roman as Rome gets.

The fountain is called the Fontana delle Anfore, and the amphora is the symbol of this district. It was designed in the 1920s by the architect Pietro Lombardi, who also made the fountains of the other city districts. But the ground of Testaccio is soft, full of ancient rubble, and soon the square began to sink. In the 1930s the fountain was dismantled and moved to a square by the river. It stayed there for eighty years. Only in 2015 did it finally come home.

Testaccio was built very quickly after 1870, when Rome became the capital of the new Italy. The planners needed housing for the workers of the river port, the factories and above all the enormous new slaughterhouse. These courtyard blocks were among the first public housing in the city, crowded, poor, proud. The people here were nicknamed testaccini, and they built a fierce identity of their own.

That identity has a colour: the yellow and red of AS Roma. From 1929 the club played at the Campo Testaccio, a wooden stadium a few streets away, and the neighbourhood sang its own anthem about it. The stadium is long gone, but ask anyone over seventy around this square and they will tell you that Roma's true home was here.

And why amphorae? Because this whole district grew in the shadow of one of the strangest places in the ancient world... a mountain made entirely of jars. You will see it in a few minutes. But first, follow your nose to the market, where Testaccio still does its shopping.
7. Testaccio Market: Ancient Warehouses Under the Stalls

Via Aldo Manuzio 66b, 00153 Roma RM, Italy

Step inside the covered market and let the noise wash over you: stallholders shouting prices, the hiss of a coffee machine, someone laughing behind a mountain of artichokes. Now look down. In places, the floor turns to glass, and under your shoes you can see ancient walls and the curved shapes of broken jars.

When the city began building this new market, which opened in 2012, the diggers hit ancient Rome almost immediately. They found the remains of warehouses from the time of the empire, along with heaps of amphorae, the clay jars that carried oil, wine and fish sauce across the Mediterranean. So the architects simply left windows in the floor. You are doing your shopping exactly where Roman merchants once stored theirs.

Two thousand years ago, this flat plain by the river was the Emporium, the great port of Rome. Ships sailed up the Tiber from the sea and unloaded everything an imperial capital of a million people needed: grain from Egypt, oil from Spain, marble from Greece. A gigantic warehouse called the Porticus Aemilia stretched for nearly five hundred metres nearby. Testaccio has always been about feeding Rome.

And it still is. This is a market where the locals actually shop. Look for the stalls selling bread stuffed with slow-cooked beef or tripe, the pizza bianca still warm from the oven, the cheese counters with wheels of pecorino romano. If you come in spring, you will see Roman artichokes piled high, the round, thornless kind that end up fried in the ghetto or braised with mint.

A little tip from the testaccini: buy something small, eat it standing up, and talk to the person who made it. Romans will tell you everything about their food if you only ask. When you are ready, walk out the back of the market and look up. There is a strange green hill rising over the rooftops. It is not a hill at all.
8. Monte Testaccio: The Mountain of Broken Jars

Via di Monte Testaccio, 00153 Roma RM, Italy

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.
9. The Mattatoio: Where the Fifth Quarter Was Born

Piazza Orazio Giustiniani 4, 00153 Roma RM, Italy

Look up at the monumental gate in front of you. On top, a winged figure wrestles a bull to the ground. It is an elegant, almost classical piece of sculpture, the kind you would expect on a museum. And in a sense this is a museum now. But for nearly a century, behind this gate, Rome slaughtered its cattle.

The Mattatoio was designed by the architect Gioacchino Ersoch and opened at the end of the 1880s. It was a model of modern hygiene for its time, with long iron halls, rail tracks and cattle pens stretching toward the river. Thousands of animals passed through here every week to feed the new capital. It finally closed in 1975.

Now here is why every food lover should stand at this gate. The workers here, the vaccinari, were often paid partly in kind, with the parts nobody else wanted: tails, tripe, cheeks, hearts, intestines. Romans call this the quinto quarto, the fifth quarter, everything left after the four prime quarters of the animal have gone to the rich. And the families of Testaccio turned it into a cuisine.

Coda alla vaccinara, oxtail stewed for hours with tomato, celery and a hint of cocoa. Trippa alla romana, with mint and pecorino. Rigatoni con la pajata, made with the intestines of a milk-fed calf, the milk still inside, which curdles into a creamy sauce as it cooks. These dishes were born in the kitchens of this street, and one of the trattorias carved into the foot of Monte Testaccio has been serving them since the nineteenth century.

Today the iron halls hold a contemporary art museum, a university faculty of architecture and markets for organic food. The cattle pens are gone, but the sculptures of bulls are still everywhere if you look. From here, walk east along the edge of the old pens toward a pyramid... yes, a real one, and the quietest, most romantic cemetery in Rome.
10. The Non-Catholic Cemetery: Keats, Shelley & the Angel of Grief

Via Caio Cestio 6, 00153 Roma RM, Italy

Push open the gate and step into the shade of the cypresses. Sounds of traffic fade away; there are tombstones leaning in the long grass, violets, a cat asleep on a sarcophagus. Oscar Wilde, who came here as a young man, called it the holiest place in Rome.

Catholic Rome would not bury Protestants, Jews, Orthodox Christians or unbelievers in consecrated ground. From the early eighteenth century, foreigners who died in the city were laid to rest here, outside the walls, at first at night, so as not to cause offence. Gradually the field beneath the pyramid became the resting place of poets, painters, diplomats and revolutionaries from every corner of the world.

Walk to the older part, to the left, and find a simple stone with a lyre and no name at all. It reads: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water. It belongs to John Keats, who died of tuberculosis in a room by the Spanish Steps in 1821, aged twenty-five, convinced that he had failed as a poet. Beside him lies his friend, the painter Joseph Severn, who nursed him to the end.

A year later, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned when his boat went down in a storm off the Tuscan coast. His body was burned on the beach at Viareggio, and according to his friends, his heart would not burn. One of them pulled it from the flames and it ended up with Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. His ashes lie here under a stone that reads Cor Cordium... heart of hearts.

Look also for the tomb of Antonio Gramsci, the Marxist thinker who died after years in Mussolini's prisons, and for the Angel of Grief, a winged figure collapsed in despair over a tomb, carved by the American sculptor William Wetmore Story for his wife in 1894. It has been copied in cemeteries all over the world. When you leave, the great white pyramid will be right in front of you.
11. Pyramid of Cestius & Porta San Paolo

Piazzale Ostiense, 00153 Roma RM, Italy

Stand on the pavement and look up at the white pyramid, sharp and gleaming against the sky, wedged into a stretch of ancient brick wall. It looks like a mistake, like a piece of Egypt dropped into Rome by accident. In fact it is one of the best-preserved monuments of the age of Augustus.

After Rome conquered Egypt in 30 BC, the city went mad for everything Egyptian: obelisks, sphinxes, gods... and pyramids. A wealthy magistrate named Gaius Cestius decided he wanted one for his tomb. The inscription tells us he was a member of the college of priests who organised the banquets for the gods, and that the pyramid was completed in three hundred and thirty days. It is about thirty-six metres high, brick and concrete clad in white marble. Rome once had at least one other pyramid, near the Vatican. It was demolished.

This one survived because of a wall. Around 270, the emperor Aurelian, fearing barbarian invasions, ringed the city with new walls, and his builders saved time by using existing structures. The pyramid became part of the defences. Next to it rises the gate the Romans called Porta Ostiensis, today Porta San Paolo, where the road left for the port of Ostia and for the basilica of Saint Paul.

Look for the plaques on the gate. On the tenth of September 1943, just after Italy's armistice, German troops advanced on Rome. Here, around this gate, Italian soldiers and ordinary citizens, some of them almost unarmed, fought to stop them. They lost, and the city was occupied for nine months, but Romans remember this as the first battle of the Resistance.

The pyramid's marble had turned black with soot by the end of the twentieth century. It was cleaned between 2013 and 2015, paid for by a Japanese businessman who loved Rome, and now it shines as Cestius intended. And the walk ends here: from the hill of the knights to the tomb of a man who just wanted to be remembered. Two thousand years later... he is.