Week Two: The Etruscans

Sorry about the long wait. This entry covers my second week here, though I have a few to catch up on. I also am working on themed entries, addressing such wonderful things as food, smells, what I need to pack for field trips...

Without further ado, Week 2:

Our major theme of week two was an ancient culture that flourished in central Italy before the rise of Rome, the Etruscans. Through the Etruscans, the culture of archaic Greek sailors was filtered into a blend of Italian morals and practicality, syncretic gods, and Greek artistic tastes. This interaction ultimately produced the Roman pantheon, effective Roman infrastructure, and the Latin alphabet.
We celebrated our Etruscan heritage with a week of museums and tombs. Museums because, well, we do that all the time. Tombs because our biggest source of information about how the Etruscans lived is how they were buried. Etruscan, the language, can be found on pottery and other items throughout central Italy. We know sort of what it sounds like, because the alphabet was adapted from Greek, but what it says is anyone’s guess. It has no modern or ancient relatives that have been recorded. Therefore we depend on the physical evidence of archaeology and the historical tradition preserved by the Romans and in odd, obscure snippets here and there in Greek writings.

Tuesday, our weekly all-fieldtrip day, was cold and rainy. This was also our first trip outside of Rome, as we made our way through southern Tuscany to visit two major Etruscan sites and a related museum. First on the list was Tarquinia, a town whose acropolis we saw only from a distance. What really interested us (i.e., what archaeologists concentrate on for evidence) were the necropoleis. Along what otherwise would have been a desolate ridge were a series of odd hut-like structures—not the original tombs, but constructions by archaeologists to protect the tombs and the staircases leading down to them. In patches we could see large stone mushroom-shaped containers, and we recognized them as the ziri from Villanovan “pozzo” burials, in which a cinerary urn and grave goods were placed and buried in a shaft. These had been excavated and surely emptied; the stone containers were left to mark the places of burial. The Etruscan tombs themselves are blocked off with handle-less doors, but they have a lighting button and a glass panel through which you can see the inside of the tombs. Here they are cut into solid bedrock, often with sarcophagus niches or basins, and they are richly decorated in frescoes. The grave goods have all been moved into collections, but in one tomb I saw two femurs propped up inside a niche, so that they were visible to visitors. (Presumably they were representative of an entire skeleton left in situ, though I haven’t seen any other bones, in or out of sarcophagi or in museums.)

We stopped at a related museum, a converted building in the nearby medieval town. Here we saw some of the vast numbers of grave goods (and some artifacts from the town for the living) excavated in Tarquinia. These included coins, stoneware, chariot wheels (the iron rims left of them), sarcophagi, temple acroteria, entire tombs’ worth in frescoes, and lots and lots of pottery. Etruscan goods include an odd fusion of inspiration from different regions of Greek exploration. When the Greeks were orientalizing, the Etruscans absorbed those layers as well. I particularly noted the decorated ostrich eggs and Egyptian jars.
Much of the pottery was actually Greek, or local imitation thereof, and of those Attic pottery (from the region around Athens) was surprisingly common. I was surprised to discover that some of the most famous examples of Attic pottery were actually found in Italy, I suppose because undisturbed tombs led to preservation of nearly-whole pots. You’ve probably seen the krater with Europa and the bull… that’s in Tarquinia. There was also, of course, the requisite collection of erotic pottery, notable only because I saw my favorite example of the genre there—one of the two sides shows a bearded man sitting flat on the floor, obviously aroused as he lifts up his standing wife’s skirts and peers under them. (The other side shows a similar-looking couple going at it doggy-style.)

Our last stop of the day was the necropolis at Cerveteri. By this point it was cold and rainy, but the visit quickly became magical. Here the tombs were constructed differently, still cut into stone, but some were shaped like houses and temples; others were small chambers, some were exposed to the surface, and we were allowed to run around and explore. Many of them were slightly flooded with stagnant water; others had dangerous passageways. Some were ornately carved and painted. It reminded me of the Shire from the Lord of the Rings, little houses cut into the sides of round, perfectly green hills. The weather made it eerie, and the early spring blossoms provided unexpected droplets of color. This was my favorite stop so far, and pictures are coming, I promise.

We polished off the week with our first visit to the Palatine and the Forum Romanum. Here we got a sort of introductory overview of the site, just so that we’d know what is where (we’ll be back several times), and we talked more specifically about the earliest remains, up through some specific examples from the Republic. Since almost everything had been built and rebuilt over the centuries, we focused our attention on spots that either had early remains left, or were especially revered and recognized by later Romans for their earlier religious or historical significance. Often the facts related to these places’ origins or significance had been lost, but Romans have always had a keen sense of history (I’m sure they’d be really into the emphasis on archaeology in the modern city, though they might howl in dismay about the state of the ruins, and how we’re not rebuilding them to their former grandeur), and they not only continued to venerate spots, but they invented new legends (often many conflicting ones) to fill in the gaps of their oral history. Following the theme, we saw the bedrock remains of Iron Age huts that had occupied the Palatine hill (even well into the Empire, an “original” hut was kept in constant repair, rebuilt as accurately as possible when it burned down, and dubbed the hut of Romulus, the city’s mythic founder). We also examined the site of the Lapis Niger, an odd spot of spiritual significance mysterious even to the Republican Romans, where archaeologists found a black stone with an archaic Latin inscription; it had been paved over as the ground level rose but marked with dark paving stones surrounded by travertine. The Lacus Curtius (a stone lined, round, shallow hole without any water in it) was venerated for similarly not-understood reasons, and accumulated several heroic stories. The Temple of Vesta, the iconic round temple of the Vestal Virgins, was the home of a cult present on the site since perhaps the 6th c. BCE.
We ended on a more practical note, exiting the Forum near the Capitoline Hill to visit the ancient prison, where prominent prisoners were taken, tossed through a dark hole in the floor to the holding chamber and execution room, where, the executioner would strangle his victims. Often their bodies were hauled up and displayed on the steps of the Curia next door, as a warning. Its temporary inhabitants and victims were a long list of the Who’s-Who of Roman political enmity, including the Catiline conspirators, Jugurtha, Vercingetorix, and Saints Peter and Paul (both executed elsewhere).
Friday the Art History trip was to the Vatican museums and the Sistine Chapel. There we listened to our long-winded professor speak for “just a few minutes” in front of a replica of Michelangelo’s Pieta (it took him more than half an hour, and the guard shooed us away), another forty about a painting of a pope and some of his connections, more than an hour in front of three Raphael altarpieces. Room after room and hallways and corridors were filled with bright frescoes of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. We bypassed other time periods, though to get to the chapel we passed through a section of more modern art, which seemed paltry and out of place after hours of splendor. Small, framed Dali paintings hanging in a plain white vaulted room seemed rather pathetic. (The Sistine Chapel was really not as impressive to me as some of the other things we had seen. The architecture was plain—the room is a gigantic box with a slightly curved ceiling, and I’ll take Michelangelo’s sculptures over his paintings any day. Otherwise, the trip was a huge, though exhausting, success. Sorry to end on that note, but that’s how the trip went. It’s really a very spectacular building.)