Testaccio sits beside a hill that Rome made out of its own rubbish. For about three centuries, the oil arriving at the river port here came in heavy clay jars from southern Spain that could not be reused, because the clay soaked up the oil and turned rancid. The empty jars were broken up and stacked on the spot, laid in ordered terraces with lime thrown over them, until the pile stood thirty-five metres high. Roughly fifty-three million jars are estimated to be inside it. The mound is grassed over and fenced, and from the street it looks like an ordinary green hill.
The quarter around it is much younger. It was laid out from the 1880s for the men who worked the river port and the city slaughterhouse, in plain blocks around courtyards, and it still feels like a working district rather than a historic one. The covered market at its centre trades in the morning and shuts by mid-afternoon. The slaughterhouse closed in 1975 and its long low sheds are now used for exhibitions, but its legacy is on every menu in the quarter: the offal cuts that its workers took home as part of their wages.