Testaccio Food and Graves

The Pyramid of Caius Cestius stands out as a sharp, white marble triangle against the Roman sky, rising over one hundred feet above the surrounding streets. Caius Cestius, a wealthy magistrate, ordered the tomb built for himself around…

The Non-Catholic Cemetery features high, irregular brick walls topped with shards of glass and dense, overgrown cypress trees that rise above the street level. Historically, the Catholic Church forbade the burial of non-Catholics in…

The deep red storefront of Salumeria Volpetti stands out along the quiet street, its windows packed with hanging wheels of cheese and cured sausages. Two brothers, Emilio and Claudio Volpetti, opened these doors in the nineteen seventies…

A large, rectangular fountain made of travertine stands at the center of Piazza Testaccio. It features a decorative basin supported by four carved amphorae, a nod to the ancient shards of Roman storage jars that form the nearby hill. For…

The Testaccio Market occupies a long, glass-walled structure dominated by a central courtyard filled with sunlight and the smell of roasting coffee. It replaced the neighborhood’s original open-air market in twenty twelve, moving vendors…

The Mattatoio stretches across the Testaccio neighborhood with long, parallel rows of red brick buildings and iron roofs. Architect Gioacchino Ersoch designed this complex in the eighteen eighties to centralize Rome’s slaughterhouse…

Checchino Dal 1887 sits at the base of Monte Testaccio, the ancient hill built entirely from discarded Roman oil amphorae. The restaurant occupies a former cave dug directly into that pile of broken pottery, which served as a natural…

Monte Testaccio rises as a jagged, artificial hill over one hundred feet high, composed entirely of millions of broken terracotta oil jars. These shards, known as amphorae, were discarded here during the height of the Roman Empire after…