The Mattatoio is Rome’s most unusual museum. It can only be compared to the city’s other unique museum: Centrale Montemartini Museum in Ostiense, a 1930s electric power station, where first-century Roman marbles share the museum space with the power generator still in place in the center of the museum space.
Dedicated to contemporary art, the museum space was in fact once a slaughterhouse, now repurposed as one of the several Rome Civic Museums, which hosts a variety of exhibits throughout the year.
As the museum’s website explains, it was originally known as the Mattatoio of Testaccio and was designed by Gioacchino Ersoch between 1888 and 1891. The design is considered to be among the most important examples of industrial architecture in the city. Restoration began in the early 2000s and the museum opened in 2006. What is unique about the building is that archeologists and architects preserved the original water storage, pens, and pig processing apparatuses that surround the building. Parts of it also hang from the ceilings of the interior of the two large gallery spaces. In the context of the historical use of the museum, there is a sharp, political edge to the exhibits in the slaughterhouse’s two pavilions that Carole and I visited this last spring.
The visitor must beware: there is a macabre nature to the structure. Upon entering the site through the front gate, just across the street from the Mercato di Testaccio, the visitor first sees – still in place, high on the exterior of the building – the iron conveyor, whose original function was to carry the already slaughtered pigs into the butchering rooms where they were prepared for market. A little farther into the grounds, the visitor can also see the watering troughs and the high steel fences that formed the corrals for the pigs before they were slaughtered. It is grim, yes, but a part of the industrial history of food production that is still with us. Depending upon the viewer’s perspective, the structure is either a fascinating look back into nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrial architecture and food processing, or a grim reminder of the history of animal cruelty in our food production industry, including the contemporary slaughter of animals.
The two shows contrast the history of agriculture in Italy with art, immigration, and ecology. The exhibits address global warming, food production, and the exploitation of those who harvest our crops and slaughter our animals; they remind us of our need to care for our environment in the face of global warming. Unfortunately, the other side of the political spectrum is still inclined to turn a blind eye to environmental concerns and the exploitation of low-paid immigrant farm labor.
In the west pavilion was a show entitled Puriurbana, dedicated to agricultural resources and the territory outside the city’s center and its surrounding suburbs, which have overtaken too much of the land once dedicated to agriculture. The show extends its scope to include the all too often unacknowledged role that immigrants play in agricultural labor: with historical photographs of workers and fields on the walls, the center of the pavilion displays early agricultural implements and hand tools once used by workers.
Most informative of all, one pavilion displays historical maps that show the development of suburban areas that, over the last two centuries, have “colonized” and erased Rome’s agricultural lands. The message is strong: this “colonization” of the land was incremental without anyone noticing and without much concern for the erasure of Rome’s agricultural heritage. In the process, urban dwellers have lost their connection to where and how the very food they eat is produced.
At the end of the pavilion is a small fishing boat, placed to symbolize the risks that immigrants take to cross the Mediterranean to arrive in Italy. For most of these immigrants, “clandestine” is perhaps a more accurate word. Upon arrival, many begin their lives in Italy as low-paid agricultural workers, especially in Calabria and other Southern states. But urban and suburban dwellers who shop at Rome’s many markets and grocery stores do so without a thought about the origin of their food and who picks and packages it. The show raises awareness of the solidarity between suburban and urban dwellers and agricultural workers and the land.
The show in the east pavilion, Terra Animata, brings images of traditional agricultural practices and art together. It contains displays of agricultural products, seeds, dried fruits, tools, and insects that play a vital role in agricultural pollination. There are also historical photographs depicting workers and agricultural production from earlier eras. Next to them are suggestive abstract sculptures that reflect our rural spaces and farmland. There is also a room where a video of actors in a pantomime harvesting low-lying crops, otherwise known as stoop labor, is displayed. As the discourse over migrants and immigrants roils Italian and EU politics, both Puriurbana and Terra Animata remind us of the central role, too often devalued, that new arrivals play in our lives.
Of course, to Italy’s great credit, the country is a worldwide leader in more sustainable and humane agricultural production. The Slow Food Movement was founded in 1989 by Folco Portinari, who was born in a small town near Turin. Portinari is credited with bringing to a wider audience in Italy, and now worldwide, greater awareness about the environment and encouraging local production of the food we consume, as opposed to the industrial production of our animal and agricultural products.
In 2007 Oscar Farinetti, born in Alba, opened his first Eataly in Turin. There are now more than forty Eatalys around the world. Farinetti’s goal, like Portinari, was to encourage and support local production and Italian culinary artisanship to promote the Italian brand throughout the world. More recently, a spring edition of Espresso announced that in 2019 Federico Romeri and Nicolò Lenoci founded Pascol in Northern Italy. Concerned that 50% of Italian meat comes from abroad, Romeri and Lenoci intend to encourage local production of meat where farmers can better control humane care for their animals and the environment. Pascol also focuses on the more humane raising of farm animals and the impact animal farming has on the environment.
As we left the show, I thought about the content of the two shows in the context of the history of the Mattatoio and its industrial production of meat. In the last century, there was little concern for the welfare of farm animals and their slaughter. But the food industry in Italy is changing, and for the better. Italy is among the world leaders advocating and practicing a more sustainable and humane treatment of the animals slaughtered for consumption.
Only steps away from the Mattatoio is the Nuovo Mercato di Testaccio, one of Rome’s most beautiful markets. On display is the region’s bountiful agricultural production and fish from the Mediterranean. Included on shelves are all the well-known DOC products that distinguish Italy not only at home but throughout the world. But the show at the Mattatoio Museum, with its ship-wrecked fishing boat, reminds us that there is a human element to the products we consume: the good prices are owing to the low cost of immigrant labor. The show and the nearby Nuovo Mercato di Testaccio, perhaps not by accident, comment upon each other: if we are to maintain our current rate of production, in both quantity and quality, we must do so with concern for our environment and the people who harvest our crops.
On that April afternoon, after a short and excellent repast in the market, Carole and I thought that a visit to the place where so much of Italy’s local production ends up would have been an appropriate complement to our day: we went to Eataly, which is only short distance from the Piazzale dei Partigiani. To check the accuracy of our cellular GPS, we asked two kind gentlemen for directions, which they confirmed. As we walked away, one of the gentlemen yelled back at us, “Buon Partigiani,” I yelled back at him, “Sì, Buon Partigiani,” as we all laughed. Politics in Italy is never far, even when asking for directions in Rome.
Ken Scambray’s most recent book is Italian Immigration in the American West: 1870-1940. (Univ. of Nevada Press)
Donate