A Curiosity of Rome - Monte dei Cocci

Monte dei Cocci

The area around Porta San Paolo in the southern part of Rome for centuries was a major commercial area. The port of Ostia, just 16 miles from the capital, traded with other Mediterranean countries, also from the Red Sea, Africa, Middle East and even India. The goods were transported by cart on Via Ostiense on a straight line from Ostia to Rome. In the area today called Testaccio, goods were sold wholesale or stored in warehouses to be sold around the city.

The extensive Roman trade network

 

On the banks of the Tiber there was also a river port where smaller ships could dock. Some ruins of the ancient warehouses can be seen from a bridge (Ponte Sublicio).  
Trade involved foodstuffs (e.g., olives, fish, meat, cereals, salt, prepared foods such as fish sauce, olive oil, wine and beer), animal products (e.g., leather and hides), objects made from wood, glass, or metals, textiles, pottery, and materials for manufacturing and construction such as glass, marble, wood, wool, bricks, gold, silver, copper, and tin.  Especially with east Africa and India, ivory, spices, silk, wild animals, and turtle shells. Finally, there was, of course, also the substantial trade in slaves.
 

Terra cotta amphorae

The containers used to transport wine and olive oil were made of terra cotta, called amphora, and could not be reused. (There was no plastic then…) So they were thrown in an area where they accumulated for centuries and became a hill, the Monte dei Cocci or the hill of shards. This artificial hill is still there in Testaccio and is 100 feet high and 1100 yards around. The name Testaccio comes from the word testae that is fragments of terra cotta amphorae used as containers for transport. It is estimated that 53 million amphorae were tossed here and that the hill reached a height of 300 feet, then slowly eroded.

An aerial view of the Monte dei Cocci

        
On this hill we have mainly amphorae from the state olive oil imports and, of course, for a city of a million people considerable additional quantities were imported privately. Only a small part of them was recycled as construction material: all the others were therefore smashed and their shards then neatly stacked in what, over the course of more than two centuries, became a huge pile raised not far from the docks. The order in which the materials are arranged, the presence of lime in the ground spread at regular intervals to mitigate the bad smell deriving from the decomposition of food residues and the existence of a well-designed inclined plane which allowed to reach the top on board of carts, suggest that the landfill was not improvised but carefully planned.

For centuries the Romans exploited the insulating properties of clay to carve out numerous caves on the slopes of this artificial hill, inside which the temperature is around 50 °F all year round. The rooms dug out in the shards were used as cellars, pantries or stables. Starting from the Middle Ages they housed taverns and, from the modern and contemporary age, restaurants and nightclubs.

The base of the hill

Excavations carried out on the site in 1881 reconstructed the approximate age of the mountain and the origin of the pottery itself; in fact, thanks to the inscriptions found on some of them, it was possible to ascertain that most of the amphorae came from the coasts of Bizacena (in today's Tunisia) and from Betica (today's Andalusia); the oldest find was dated to the year 144 AD, the most recent to 251. 

Each amphora, from the moment of its creation, bore a manufacturer's stamp and, once filled, the so-called tituli picti, i.e. information such as the content, the name of the exporter, the date of dispatch, the place of provenance and in some cases also the destination. The examination of the different types of amphorae in the various layers and the indications of origin and content, also constituted a precious source for reconstructing the history of trade in Rome.
     

Markings on the amphorae

To show how traditions can last, up until the 1950’s still some people in the area were throwing old terracotta pots on the hill. Now at the base of the hill, excavated in the ancient shards, we have many restaurants and night clubs and the entire neighborhood of Testaccio has changed from being a working-class area to a trendy one, where you can’t find a parking spot on Saturday night.

Cinecittà, Rome's Film Studio

Every year 100,000 people visit Cinecittà, a large film studio in Rome. With new investments and technologies these historic studios can become again the most important in Europe. The following was adapted from an article in The Economist.

Can Cinecittà become Europe’s premier film hub?

Italy is planning a new golden age for Rome’s historic studio

Filmmakers and actors such as Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Ettore Scola, Sergio Leone, Bernardo Bertolucci, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Mel Gibson, Anna Magnani, Alberto Sordi, Vittorio De Sica, Clint Eastwood, Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni, Marlon Brando, Kirk Douglas, Audrey Hepburn, Claudia Cardinale and Pier Paolo Pasolini have worked at Cinecittà. More than 3,000 movies have been filmed there, of which 90 received an Academy Award nomination and 47 of these won it. In the 1950s, the number of international productions being made there led to Rome being dubbed "Hollywood on the Tiber."

Tourists can visit the sets of classic films

When you arrive at Cinecittà, you pass through a gatehouse built in the rationalist style popular in Italy in the early 20th century. It seems to prepare you for a journey into the past. That is what the vast majority of visitors—around 100,000 a year—come for. Cinecittà, spread over more than 40 hectares on the outskirts of Rome, hosts the Italian Museum of Moving Images, which includes a permanent exhibition on the illustrious cinematic history of Cinecittà itself and another dedicated entirely to Federico Fellini, devised by his protégé, an Oscar-winning set designer, Dante Ferretti.

Beyond the warehouse-like structures that house Cinecittà’s 19 stages, tourists can wander through its back lots and permanent sets. The most extensive is a fiberglass reproduction of an ancient Roman city, complete with an amphitheater and triumphal arch. It is a reminder of the studio’s glory days in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when it was used to make epics including “Ben Hur” and “Cleopatra” and earned the title of “Hollywood on the Tiber”.

Fellini's Amarcord was filmed here

 

Until quite recently, says Cinecittà’s ceo, Nicola Maccanico, “this was a place where people came to experience the history of cinema and where, every so often, someone would come to make a film.” For the most part, the directors were either Italian or of Italian descent, such as Martin Scorsese, who made “Gangs of New York” at the studios, or Anthony Minghella, who chose Cinecittà for “The English Patient”. But all that may be about to change drastically.

In absolute terms, Italy is the largest beneficiary of the European Union’s post-pandemic recovery fund: it has received or borrowed more than €200bn ($210bn). Of that, €260m has been earmarked for upgrading and vastly expanding Cinecittà. “The production of films, series and documentaries is undergoing a dizzying growth,” says the culture minister, Dario Franceschini. “We must make sure we’re ready.”

The plan is to increase the number of stages on the existing site to 24 and develop a new, 31-hectare site nearby. The new plot, just half a kilometre away at its nearest point, will have an additional eight stages and 16 hectares of back lot. Whether you measure it by surface area or the number of stages, Cinecittà is about to expand by more than two-thirds. It will also acquire some state-of-the-art equipment already in use in studios in America and Britain—including a giant led screen that immerses actors in the fantasy they are enacting far more effectively than a traditional green screen.

A more recent film, Under the Tuscan Sun

 

 

 

 

The question is whether this huge investment will pay off. Until a couple of months ago, the answer was patently yes. Cinecittà was fully booked, its fortunes having improved gradually over the past ten years, partly because of the advent of streaming. But the announcement in April of a drop in subscriptions to Netflix has cast a shadow over the entire film and TV industry. And now large parts of the world economy face inflation and maybe recession.

Mr. Maccanico agrees that “there could be a period of consolidation. But I think that the spaces that we are going to create at Cinecittà would be viable even in a period of slow growth.” Rome, he argues, holds immense attractions for film-makers, even in the face of growing competition from lower-cost studios in eastern Europe.

First, a generous tax break: a 40% credit on eligible production expenses incurred in Italy, which can be up to 75% of the total production cost and a maximum of €20m a year. Then there are Cinecittà’s seasoned technicians. And finally, says Mr. Maccanico, there is Rome itself. “If you say to a Charlize Theron we’re going to be shooting for six months in Sofia or six months in Rome…” Mr. Maccanico leaves the sentence unfinished, but with an eloquent lift of the eyebrows that implies that, for stars used to a certain quality of life, the choice is obvious.