The Barberini Butchers

An examination of how the unsustainable consumption of meat in seventeenth-century Rome both symbolized the extent of papal power and sparked the outbreak of civil war

In 1644 four norcini or pork butchers were accused of killing not pigs, but seven of their fellow citizens, stripping the meat from the bones, then combining it with pig to make sausages, which were then sold to Romans from their shop behind the Pantheon. In the multiple pamphlets describing th…