One of the highlights of this trip to Tuscany came on the last day. On our way back to Rome, we stopped at the small coastal town of Tarquinia. Two and a half millennia ago, this was a large and prosperous Etruscan settlement. From the 5th to the 2nd century BCE, the residents built a huge necropolis -- a "city of the dead" -- on a high, windy ridge with a view of the sea just outside their city. We had seen many Etruscan artifacts that had been removed from these tombs when we toured the museums at Villa Giulia (see blog entry of April 12) and at Volterra (see blog entry of April 29), so we were really looking forward to a chance to explore the tombs themselves.Archeologists say that there are about 6000 tombs in this one burial ground. Many of them (but by no means all) have been excavated, but visitors can only go down into about fifteen of them at any one time. The tombs we explored here were very different from the one we saw just outside Volterra. That one consisted of a large undecorated circular room with four smaller burial chambers, each outfitted with stone "beds" for the deceased. The tombs at Tarquinia were for the most part a single rectangular room. The sloped ceilings and walls were decorated with paintings depicting the pleasures of the afterlife: banquets, hunting, music, dance, sex. The burial chambers are now about 20-30 feet underground. Here are some pictures of what we saw:
https://picasaweb.google.com/SteveDC505/Tombs?authkey=Gv1sRgCIbv-q7U5caWngE#
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