Saturday's necropolis

Saturday, May 11th 2013: continued

On the bus to Tarquinia Matt had pointed out some road signs for a "Necropolis". Since he (and me for that matter) tend to point out every road sign going I had dismissed this as "probably the municipal cemetery". But flicking through my helpful town guide it seemed that it might be something more interesting: an Etruscan necropolis. We located it on the right hand edge of our touristical map but as the touristical map didn't have a scale or any directional markings it wasn't clear whether it really was a 10-15 minute walk away (based on our experience of wandering the town), or whether it had been put schematically here and was actually located at the End of a Very Long Road. (As an aside I would like to applaud the towns where they mark the distance, or even better the estimated walking time, on their touristical signs.)

Fortunately Tarquinia had been gifted a reasonably logical cartographer. The map was to (an unspecified) scale and after walking 20 minutes along a fairly unlikely looking road we came to the UNESCO World Heritage Site. It turns out that this is the largest (known) Etruscan burial site.

There are about 6000 (known) "graves", of which most are "basic" burial mounds, but there are about 200 (known) decorated "sepulchres" (tombs). (Sorry about all the inverted commas.) Of these about 20 are open to the public. They are conserved within little "huts" and you view the subterranean burial chambers through glass / plastic / perspex (or something of that nature) - this is because the humidity of the visitors can damage the ancient wall art.

The sepulchres (no more inverted commas, I promise) date from the 6th to the 2nd centuries BC and I was fascinated to see the evolution of concepts of the after life. In the most ancient of the sepulchres the walls are decorated with scenes of banqueting, dancing, music and hunting. At this time (or so goes the theory) the Etruscans believed that the spirit of the deceased lived on in the place that they were buried.

I would choose 3 of those 4 things to decorate my burial chamber with if that was the case. In the later sepulchres you could see the influence of the Greek Theory of the after-life with images of people being led through doors to the Next World. Some of the later ones also had some erotic scenes, apparently influenced by the cult of Dionysus (whoever he or she was - perhaps I should find out). 

I'm embarrassed to say that I knew nothing about the Etruscans before, I know a little now and might even pay a visit to that section of the British Museum to learn more. The necropolis was most certainly worth parting with a few tourist Euros for, especially when you consider (given the going rate of 50 cents a go) we each had one Euro's worth of toilet usage on our visit.