Special Access Area: Monte Testaccio — Imperial Rome’s Broken Pottery Mountain

Ok, you are not going to build a mountain out of one oily amphora. Yet thanks to circa 300,000 amphora imported yearly, Imperial Rome built a sizable hill of a broken pottery in its backyard over the course of two hundred years! (The hill is the green pimple at the bottom center of the recreation.) So, to better understand Imperial Rome, tour Monte Testaccio!

We could argue that Romans were master urban planners and rightly created this garbage heap of broken amphora next to Rome’s riverside port/industrial zone. You can see the Tiber River, the bustling harbor, and wall-to-wall warehouses in the recreation mentioned above. On a daily basis, dockworkers unloaded amphora by the thousands. Some amphora contained liquids, such as olive oil, linseed oil, wine, and soy-sauce-like garum.

Others contained peach preserves, dried beans, and wheat from Egypt, Sicily, and Sardinia. As the oil amphorae from Spain and North Africa stacked up, someone was in charge of removing them, breaking them into pieces, stacking them in an orderly fashion, and covering them with lime (to neutralize the stench). During your tour of Monte Testaccio, the labor intensive stacking of the shards will stun you. For a preview, watch this video that describes the hill’s history.

We could argue that Imperial Romans were slightly out of their mind for stacking oily amphora fragments in their backyard. After all, by circa 250 A.D., the mountain may have been around 50 meters (i.e. 150 feet) tall! (It is now about 36 meters tall — circa 108 feet, having been partially buried by the rising ground level and slowly leveled over the course of time.) 150 feet of broken pottery must have been an ugly blight on the city’s horizon! Or was it? As we tour Monte Testaccio, we will discuss the garbage heap’s history as well as surprising attitudes toward trash in Imperial Rome.