Testaccio, the hill

The name of the Testaccio district comes from the Latin “testae”: jars.

Testaccio is in fact an artificial hill made of thousands and thousands of fragments of abandoned amphorae once used for transporting goods that arrived in the nearby river port from all over the Empire. The hill still exists and is also known as The monte de’ Cocci, the hill of the crocks.

This story it pretty much known by everyone in Rome but then nobody really climbed the hill, nobody really knows where was the ancient harbour, how this trade actually worked in the past and why it happened right there near the sacred Pons sublicius (the sublicius bridge).

we will seek for answers: we will locate the ruins of Emporium, we will see the remains of the majestic porticus Aemiliae and above all we will ascend the Monte of Cocci, admiring Rome from up there, from Testaccio, as Pasolini in that famous photo (photo: Paolo di Paolo) ...

via Nicola Zabaglia 24