Testaccio

A hill made of rubbish

Testaccio is flat, gridded, and almost entirely free of souvenir shops. Solid early-twentieth-century blocks, a market at the centre, and a decent chance you'll be the only foreigner in the room at lunch.

The landmark is Monte Testaccio, and it needs explaining because the explanation is better than the sight. It's a hill fifty metres high made entirely of smashed amphorae. Something like fifty-three million of them, olive-oil jars from Spain and North Africa that couldn't be reused because the oil went rancid in the clay, stacked deliberately and carefully over roughly three centuries. Romans call it Monte dei Cocci, the hill of shards. It is the largest surviving pile of ancient rubbish anywhere and it is genuinely one of the most extraordinary objects in Europe.

At night the base of it turns into a strip of clubs cut into the pottery. They stay cool in August for reasons that are entirely geological.

Piramide, and the pyramid

It's south of the centro on the east bank, below the Aventine and directly across the water from Trastevere.

Metro B to Piramide, named for the Pyramid of Cestius which is right there beside the station: a genuine 36-metre pyramid built as a tomb around 12 BC, during the brief and intense Roman craze for all things Egyptian after Cleopatra. It got absorbed into the city walls three centuries later and has been sitting in traffic ever since. From the station the market is seven minutes' walk.

From Trastevere, cross Ponte Testaccio on foot in about ten minutes. From the Colosseum, three stops on Line B or twenty-five minutes' walk.

What to eat, and where

This is the entire reason to come, so build a lunch or a dinner around it rather than passing through on the way somewhere.

Mercato di Testaccio replaced the old market hall in 2012 and is the best market in Rome for eating rather than shopping. Go at lunch. The food counters are the point and the good ones sell out by mid-afternoon. Mordi e Vai is the famous stall: a former butcher serving boiled beef in its own juices, packed into a roll until the bread gives up. Around €5. There's usually a queue of people in work clothes, which is the signal you want.

Flavio al Velavevodetto is built into the flank of Monte Testaccio itself, and there's a glass panel in the dining room so you can see the amphora fragments behind it. It's the reference point for the four Roman pastas: carbonara, cacio e pepe, amatriciana, gricia.

Felice a Testaccio does the cacio e pepe Romans argue about, tossed at the table in a hollowed wheel of pecorino. Book it, properly, in advance.

If you want the cheap version of all this, Trapizzino was invented on this street: a triangular pocket of pizza dough filled with the slow-cooked stews — pollo alla cacciatora, coda alla vaccinara — that would otherwise need a sit-down meal. About €4.50 and it works standing up.

Basing yourself here

Good for a second visit, or for anyone whose trip is genuinely organised around eating.

You get a real neighbourhood at noticeably lower prices, a Line B stop, and the best food in Rome within five minutes of the door. For a week that's an excellent trade. You come home in the evening to somewhere that isn't a tourist district, which matters more than people expect.

For a first three-day trip it's probably too far out. Twenty-five minutes to the Colosseum and considerably more to the Vatican adds up quickly when the clock is the constraint.