Food Tours · Tour

A Trattoria Cut Into a Hill of Broken Amphorae

Three and a half hours in Testaccio, the neighbourhood between the Aventine and the river that was Rome's slaughterhouse district and is now where Romans go to eat. This was the first food tour in the city, running since 2011, and it takes twelve people. Monte Testaccio, which the tour eats inside, is the thing to understand about the place. It is a hill about thirty-five metres high made entirely of smashed Roman amphorae, an estimated fifty-three million of them, stacked in ordered layers over roughly 250 years because the oil jars arriving at the river port could not be reused. Trattorias are cut into its flank, and the porous shards keep their cellars cold without machinery. In one of them you eat Rome's three defining pastas in a row: carbonara, amatriciana and cacio e pepe, which differ from each other by one ingredient each and taste nothing alike. Before that, on Via Marmorata, there are cured meats and artisanal cheeses with an olive oil and balsamic tasting and a glass of prosecco. You pass the Pyramid of Cestius, a 12 BC tomb built by a magistrate with a taste for Egypt, standing inside the Non-Catholic Cemetery where Keats and Shelley are buried. In the Testaccio market you get chopped tomatoes dressed in front of you, bruschetta you assemble yourself, a caprese with buffalo mozzarella and a supplì with a cold beer. The last stop is a gelateria that has been open for a hundred and five years, where the guide teaches you to tell real gelato from the piled, over-coloured kind before handing you a cone. Nine tastings in total with Italian wine and beer. Wheelchair accessible. Minimum two guests. Children under four join free without food. Stops vary by day and season. Dietary requirements can often be handled with notice; severe allergies cannot.