Before the Romans…

Greetings from Tarquinia, a small city 40 miles north of Rome.  It’s founding predates the founding of Rome by two centuries.  Legend has it that Tarchon, a Greek, founded the city shortly after the end of the Trojan War.  While Rome was a small village struggling to survive, Tarquinia was the capital of the Etruscan League…the largest of 12 Etruscan cities on the Italian peninsula.

Tarquinia is a UNESCO World Heritage site because of the rich Etruscan archeological relics found in the 6-thousand tombs in the area.  Initially, the Etruscans were identified as Greek by the foot ware in their paintings.  But more recently, DNA evidence from some of the tombs confirms their lineage.  

Most of the 6-thousand tombs belonged to commoners.  These tombs were nothing more than holes cut into the rock to accommodate an urn holding the deceased’s ashes…and then capped with a large lid.

However, there are dozens of tombs from aristocrats that provide ample clues into life during pre-Roman times.  Many of those were pillaged by tomb robbers and private "archeologists" who sold their contents to overseas museums or private collectors.

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Today, the tombs that remain are hermetically sealed to preserve them.  Their contents have been moved to the Etruscan National Museum here in town.

Access to each of the tombs is down a dark flight of stairs.  At the bottom of the stairs is a window into life two and a half millennia ago.

The tombs were large rooms that held a sarcophagus of the deceased, some of his most cherished possessions, and paintings on the plaster walls.  The paintings in the earliest of the tombs often showed fierce animals…like the lions in this mural…designed to scare tomb raiders away.  

The Etruscans believed the soul stayed in the tomb for eternity.  Later tomb scenes showed activities the deceased enjoyed, like dancing or athletic events…to help pass eternity pleasurably.

Later still, Greek theology evolved.  The concept of the afterlife became incorporated in their religion, and this wall painting shows the deceased bidding his family farewell and about to pass through the doors of this life into the Netherworld.

The quality of the funerary art is surprisingly good for small, isolated communities hundreds of miles removed from the centers of Greek culture.

The urns found in the tombs show the Etruscans have mastered the art of painting the human figure realistically.

Each of the urns tells a story, usually from Greek mythology... 

...sort of a graphic novel of its time.









Tombs for males often contained momentos of their achievements in life.

This bronze coin found in one tomb belies the cliche, “You can't take it with you,"...at least as far as the Etruscans were concerned.

The same applied for the tombs of women.  Necklaces and gold rings were part of what they tried to take into the afterlife.

Roger’s favorite of all the artifacts in the Etruscan Museum, however, was this bronze trumpet…found the the tomb of an apparent music lover.  This was one of but many indications that music played a significant role in the daily lives of the aristocratic class.

The piece de resistance, however, was the recreation of a sculpture of two winged horses, excavated from the ruins of an Etruscan temple in 1938.  The original was too badly damaged to restore.

The irony of all this is, Tarquinia remains off most tourists’ radar.  DH Lawrence came here to view the archeological excavations in the 1920’s and wrote about them.  But, the consensus among early travel writers was that this part of Italy was a malarial swamp beset by highwaymen and best avoided by a sensible tourist.  Contemporary travel writers, it seems, have stuck with the conventional wisdom...even though neither highwaymen nor malaria has not been an issue for at least four decades.