Testaccio: The Waste Dump of Ancient Rome

A bustling, slightly "urban gritty" section of the city scene; most people did not appear fresh off the plane from the US (like us), but seasoned residents of the city, young and old alike. There seemed to be more local people just living their lives in Rome.

Lots of store front businesses, restaurants, coffee bars, hair and nail salons, car repair shops and even custom dress makers shops. After being home for a month or more, I realize that most of the better restaurants we experienced were in Testaccio; more diverse than the usual pizza and pasta of Trastevere.

In the Ancient City, Testaccio was an "out-skirt" of the Central City, it was used as a garbage dump of a particular kind: crockery jars that were used to transport and store olive oil could not be re-used because the oily residue in the jar would go rancid and smell bad. Those jars were brought to Testaccio. Over the many centuries these built up into a huge hill of many acres of size---and it stunk!

The sizeable base of the hill is now ringed by one of the most interesting and evocative streets you'll every see.  A hodge-podge of old houses, apartments, store fronts, restaurants, bars, little work shops, more car repair shops, etc. etc. If there is one place I did not take enough photos.....

Looking up the hill, you can see the row upon row of broken and stacked crockery.  The Park is only open at lect times, like Sunday afternoons? or else we would have explored further. Just another place where you can imagine the many generations of workman--probably slaves--breaking and stacking the jars, the smell of the oil--does the residue of the oil still seep out after a big rain??

The emblem of this area.

And just some of the (probably thousands?) of 19th and early 20th Century apartment blocks built to house the workers of those times. So old that they were built without elevators, most probably still without. Laundry and bedding hanging out the windows to air or dry. No screens on the windows? How do they not have mosquitos? Rome was once subject to malaria... hunh. Something else to wonder about.