The most natural entry point that draws the reader--and drew me!--into the book is the tale of the cannibal butchers. According to a series of pamphlets issued in 1644, in that year four norcini or pork butchers were executed in Rome atop a large stage erected in front of the Pantheon. Their excruciating deaths were deemed exemplary punishment for a heinous crime: the four meat-sellers were convicted of killing—not just pigs, but seven of their fellow Roman citizens, stripping the meat from the corpses, and grinding it together with pork to make sausage. These sausages were then sold to the Roman populace from a shop behind the Pantheon. Beyond the gruesome and perhaps fantastical details, the account is rich with symbolic meaning and is likely meant as an attack on the rule of Pope Urban VIII (Maffeo Barberini, r. 1623-1644). That attack can only be understood by looking at the culture of meat-eating and food in general in Rome in the period after the Reformation (roughly 1550 to 1650). The Barberini Butchers explores the story of the cannibal butchers, but along the way examines how and why so much meat was brought to Rome for a few decades in the seventeenth century, what the religious and political meaning of it was, and how eventually it fell apart.

There are also a few other stories from the book that will likely spark the interest of modern readers. The first is well represented by a modified version of an early modern map of Rome (The Nolli Map) below.

This black line marks the route of animals through Rome as they entered the city and travelled to the Campo Vaccino, or Roman meat market. In an era before refrigeration, meat would spoil if it was transported long distances, so animals had to be brought live into cities and butchered in the various shops there. This created large issues of pollution and crowding: animals produce a great amount of feces, need sizable quantities of feed, and are liable to stampede or simply be in the way as people would try to make their way through city streets. Rome, however, had an advantage over so many other cities that might try to bring lots of meat to market: The Aurelian walls that had been built in ancient Rome ringed a city that had been built for a million people, but in 1600 only about 100,000 lived there. Mostly residents lived close to the bends in the Tiber River, and so there were significant swaths of the city that were less heavily inhabited, despite being technically within the city. This made it easier for farmers to enter the city through the less densely inhabited areas and bring their animals to the central meat market, which was in fact the ancient Roman Forum remade into a field for animals. Thereby many of the problems that might have bedeviled other early modern cities had easier solutions in Rome. Animals could move to the meat market with relative ease and the pre-existing urban structure even allowed there to be a good-sized field and market in the city itself.

On the other side, the intensive efforts to extract resources from the Roman countryside may have contributed to a sort of ecological collapse. Several decades after the height of the meat moment, supplies had halved even as the population of the city doubled. One rancher from the countryside pleaded to Roman officials that the land no longer would support the number of animals he was supposed to raise. As he wrote:

"There are not provinces which in recent years in these parts have not experienced a notable atmospheric change. The bushes have thinned, the directions of the winds have changed, the water ways have been diverted, and a thousand other causes have had the effects that should naturally come with them. It is true that nearly all of the shepherds complain that the pastures in the Agro Romano are more scarce than they were in previous years[.] The remaining grasses are nearly lost and totally dried out during the burning summer and likewise in the more severe winters. Excessive drought, too much humidity, old age, and noxious weeds are the ruin of the pastureland. And so it should not come as a surprise that the pasturelands are too expensive to rent even if the number of animals has notably diminished"

Although not all of these atmospheric changes can be attributed to over-farming, it is likely that the papal efforts to funnel meat to Rome helped usher in this environmental degradation. This is especially true since the sheep, which were so central to the papal meat program, are a particularly damaging animal that can destroy all sort of plant life through their grazing and thereby alter the flora and fauna of a region.