Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. Come along for free, or pay to keep us on the road.
Before we jump into this, two confessions. First, this article won’t feature our own photos, since both of these towns are mostly about the Etruscan cemeteries, and the official pictures are way better than any of ours. Second, though I’ve already told you about the cemeteries and the towns, this article won’t really be about them or their funeral grounds.
So what is this article about, then, you may ask, rightly so? Etruscans. Mostly. But I will reference the towns and other ones as well. Also a lot about Rome. Gladiators. Religion. I’ve studied history, but this is not a history blog, it’s a travel one, so I have to keep some connections to today’s world. The cemeteries of Tarquinia and Cerveteri are landmarks and sights of their own, and if you are anything close to interested in ancient history, if you enjoyed the Pyramids or the Acropolis, this is the Italian version of them outside of the Roman Forum and the Colosseum. Though both the Forum and the Colosseum have Etruscan heritage. But more on that later.
So let’s begin our journey at Viterbo. We’ve driven from Viterbo to Rome, and there are two options: go inland through the lakes, or go by the coast. We visited these towns during this trip, plus as day trips from Rome to Cerveteri. The coastal road to Rome is not rocky, there is no drama like in Amalfi or in Liguria. It’s a plain coast, mostly, with, to be honest, kinda boring seaside towns. Almost no tourists, no one goes to these towns for a holiday, except Italians, mostly from Rome. But some of the old Etruscan cities are here, at least whatever is left of them.
Before we talk about the towns, let’s answer the basic question in the title: who the hell are the Etruscans? I’ll give you the TLDR version.
The original civilizations (Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, etc.) were all built around a big river in a warm place. Why?
River = irrigation, which means growing your own stuff rather than hunting it, which means a surplus. Surplus = wealth = city = governance = military = civilization.
Warm because that’s where wild wheat and barley grew. And why were humans down there at all? Because during the last Ice Age everything north of roughly Berlin was under an ice sheet, so you lived in the south or you died. People moved south because of the ice. The cities came thousands of years later, because of the rivers.
So the original inhabitants of present-day Italy were hunter-gatherers who’d sat out the Ice Age in caves along the coast. Around 6000 BC, farmers arrived from Anatolia with wheat, sheep and pottery, and mostly outbred the cave people. Around 2000 BC, herders came down from the steppes of present-day Ukraine with horses, wagons, and the language that would become Latin. Mix the three, and you have almost everyone in Europe today.
The Etruscans were that same mix. Genetically, they are the Latins next door. The one thing that sets them apart is their language, which is not Indo-European and not related to anything we can read. Well, we can read it, we just can’t understand most of it.
They grew up on the volcanic plateau between the Arno and the Tiber, the soft tuff country where Cerveteri and Tarquinia sit today. Soft rock is easy to cut into a tomb, and the sea is two hours’ walk. The Po, the big river everyone assumes must be the cradle, came later: they expanded north into it in the sixth century BC. The Po was their crown jewel, never their birthplace.
Timing? People had been living in that area forever, but the Etruscans as Etruscans show up around 900 BC, in the Iron Age, with proper city-states by 700. It’s when the entire Mediterranean wakes up. The Greeks have the Olympics running and start colonizing Puglia and Sicily, trading with the Etruscans. The Phoenicians build Carthage and start trading with, guess who, the Etruscans. The Assyrians are the world’s first military superpower, and everyone is scared of them. Lydia in Anatolia invents coins; the Greeks pick them up within a generation, the Etruscans, oddly, take their time. To do what? Trade more. And where there is trade, there is culture, and exchange of ideas, and connection with each other.
So fast forward to around 700 BC, and you have the Etruscan civilization with a network of a dozen city-states, and something going on in the south, on some muddy hills around a smaller river, the Tiber, with some people there called Latins who had just moved out of their huts. This is where we catch up with the Etruscans.
By 700 BC, they were big on three things:
Trading with all these new neighbors. Especially through their coastal towns like Cerveteri (called Caisra). The Etruscans became rich enough to build many of their cities.
Water and architecture. The drains, the tunnels, the sewers, the arches, all that you think were Roman? The Etruscans made them, and the Romans adopted them later. They drained the marshes and cut water tunnels through the tuff of Etruria, their land. The name Tuscany comes from them. So does Tuscia.
Religion and funerals. More on this below.
Campanilismo is one of the most important things in Italy. It comes from the idea of minding whatever is close to your village’s bell tower, and nothing else. It comes from Italy’s city-state heritage. Not medieval, not even Roman, but Etruscan. Well, the city-state is the original form of civilization anyway, but in Italy, the Etruscans did it first.
Their cities were independent, and their leaders met once a year at a shared sanctuary to coordinate trade and religion. The cities were so independent that they couldn’t care less if one of them was attacked. They had no military coordination and no national alignment. The only thing they shared was their religion. Which was quite odd.
We know more about their religion than we know about anything else. Why? They thought their lives were set by the Gods, already decided and planned out, so why bother? So they built their houses from wood and mudbrick, but they built their cemeteries from stone. Wooden houses, stone tombs. Which is why almost anything that has survived from their civilization can be found in their graves, literally. There are some arches and city walls that have survived, like the arch in Volterra, but mostly, nothing, only their cemeteries. And we know the religion itself because the Romans copied their books and kept their priests on the payroll for five centuries after the last Etruscan city fell.
Cerveteri and Tarquinia (Etruscan names: Caisra and Tarchna) have these Etruscan necropolises, burial grounds. They were among their biggest cities, with tens of thousands of people and immense wealth, as they were trading centers, but nothing was left, only the cemeteries. This is also true of Veii, the Etruscan city closest to Rome, or any of the others. Nothing remained, except burial grounds, because those were carved into stone. So, if you want to see or learn about them, the best place to start is either Cerveteri or Tarquinia and their necropolis. The museums around them are pretty amazing.
Etruscan religion is fascinating. First off, they thought the Gods don't watch over us or interfere in our lives, they have already decided our lives. This is fundamentally different from most religions. Most have some concept of free will, where Gods either watch over us or interfere, but the bottom line is that we live our lives as we please. Not for Etruscans. They thought the only thing they could do was to get out of the way or negotiate some sort of delay with the Gods. Because everything is already written, decided, and we are here only to read the signs.
Second, this reading part. Most religions think lightning happens and then we look for its meaning. Etruscans thought that lightning was thrown to say something. Everything is a sign. The only question is whether you can read. The world is a message from the Gods. The priests don’t interpret events for the people. They simply read the signs.
Think about science. According to science, lightning has causes, but no intentions. If you’re religious, you add meaning afterward. Or Christianity, where you have a God who speaks, but he spoke only a few times, in a book. The world is created by this God. But this God does not dictate the world. The storm is weather, and miracles are rare, and if you are reading God’s mood in every cloud, the priest will say that “God moves in mysterious ways,” which is the translation of “calm the f down, my child.” The Etruscan Gods are always talking, you are just not paying attention.
Today, if something happens, you ask: “What does God mean by this?” The Etruscan asks: “What did God want to tell us, and did we catch it in time?” The event is not interpreted to frame a lesson. The event is the lesson.
Two distinctive things make these burial grounds interesting.
One is the women. Yeah, you wouldn’t have guessed it, right? Now, I wouldn’t say with a straight face that the original feminists were Etruscans, but only in their culture do you see women right next to men. How do others illustrate women? As caretakers of children or men, or as muses for arts and entertainment. Traditional stereotypes. For the Etruscans, women were shown equal to men. They ate with the men, on the same couch. They had their own names, and their mother’s family name on the tomb next to the father’s. They could write, socialize, and even rule. They could accumulate wealth, carry their family lineage, and own property. Remember, that wasn’t possible for a married woman in England until the late 19th century, let alone in other civilizations at the time. A woman in Athens wasn’t even allowed to leave the house unless she had a good reason.
Two is the timeline. These cemeteries carry hundreds of years. Etruscans believed that everything is already set by the Gods, as I explained above. This was true for their own lives, their cities’ lives, and also their entire civilization’s lineage. In fact, they gave their own civilization ten ages. At the end of the tenth, it stops existing. An age lasted as long as the longest life born at its start, and when that person died, the Gods sent a sign to close it, and the priests read it. The cemeteries capture several of these ages. By the time Rome becomes a thing (753 BC), the Etruscans are only around their second or third.
So the early paintings in these cemeteries are cheerful, happy, warm, and full of life. People are shown entertaining, having fun, being together. In the later ones, you see demons with weapons, winged women, and people being led together to some dark place. Everything turns dark, gloomy, pessimistic.
Thanks to Rome. During these times, Rome starts expanding from the hills next to the Tiber. Everything starts to stick together: their loose network of city-states, their fatalist religion, their lack of a unified military, and the last ages of their civilization. Rome conquered Etruscan cities one by one. Rome besieged Veii for ten years. Every year, Veii’s leaders went to the shared sanctuary and asked the other cities for help. Every year, the other cities said no. Veii fell to Rome. By the end, Rome had conquered all of their cities and assimilated their people. And here is the part I love: they got Roman citizenship in 90 BC, and within a generation, their own priests announced that the final age had begun.
So, in a way, the Etruscan fatalistic religion was right: they stopped existing, ending their lineage, because they became Romans. So much so that the last three kings of Rome were Etruscans. And when Rome threw the last one out in 509 BC and called itself a Republic, the Etruscan cities were doing the same thing at home, replacing kings with elected magistrates. Even the census and the class system Rome ran on for centuries came from the second Etruscan king.
Oh, and lastly, those gladiator games? They started as funeral games, to honor the dead by spilling blood on the ground. The Romans took them from the Etruscans and turned them into a circus. Also, the Roman toga? The Roman arches? The Roman sewers? Even Mussolini’s famous fascist symbol, the Roman fasces? All of these were originally Etruscan.
All the cities you visit nowadays, Bologna, Modena, Perugia, Arezzo, Volterra, Cortona, Orvieto, Chiusi, and so on, are Etruscan cities at their foundations. Even people in present-day Tuscany still carry Etruscan genes from ancestors absorbed by the Romans, who adopted Latin yet still grow the same olive trees above their cities’ burial grounds.
And, just to upset the French, because that is always fun, French wine is Etruscan. They shipped wine and vines to the coast of Gaul, and that’s the oldest winemaking evidence in France. You are welcome, Frenchies, cheers from Lattara.
