A COWBOY IN ETRURIA

 

Six days into a week-long stay in Tuscany, my wife and I and two friends, both Florentine residents, decided to break away from the Renaissance museum that is Florence and go deep into Italy’s pre-Roman past - its Etruscan past.

 

Despite my having read about them in the past in dim and musty history books, my first real introduction to the Etruscans came when I spent two summer months in Italy many years ago. In an attempt to do something completely different from B-school, I decided to indulge my inner cineaste and take a summer course in film in Rome. Unfortunately, upon arriving at the school I learned to my chagrin that the film course had been cancelled. The alternatives were painting and archaeology. The latter meant digging all summer whilst the former meant tramping the streets of Rome dragging an easel and wearing a beret with a cigarette dangling from my mouth, such was the fashion statement of the day.  This was a no-brainer; I was going to be the next Picasso. So I embarked on an immensely trying odyssey of painting movement, capturing the baroque spirit of Rome through color, and so on and so forth. I burned all my paintings at the end of the course (they were truly execrable) but I did have one brush with archaeology and the Etruscans which left a lingering impression on me. Towards the end of my stay, I visited friends who had opted to take the archaeology course in Cerveteri.

 

 

An aerial view of the Etruscan necropolis of Cerveteri

 

 

Cerveteri, which is just outside of Rome, boasts of a large Etruscan necropolis which at the time was not fully excavated. As is true in most digs, the archaeologists always opted to recruit slave labor in order to cut costs. The slave labor constituted of a contingent of students who were willing not only to work for free, but to actually pay for the privilege of hacking away in a dig all summer. So not only did the archaeologists save on labor; they actually made some money off it!

On the day I visited Cerveteri, my friends took me to where they were digging to acquaint me with what they were up to. I decided it would be foolish to leave without actually crawling into a partially excavated tomb and peeping into the main burial area. A peephole is normally carved out on the wall of an unopened tomb so that archaeologists can peer into it without disturbing anything. What I saw through the peephole was some broken pottery, bones scattered on the floor, and a partially ruined fresco. The consequence of this momentary encounter was a lifelong curiosity about the Etruscans and the land called Etruria.

Exterior of an Etruscan tomb in Cerveteri

 

Interior of a tomb

 

 

Etruria lay in central Italy between the valley of the Tiber, the valley of the Arno, and the Apennines. Legend had it that the Etruscans originated from Lydia, kingdom of the legendary King Midas, he of the golden touch. They were a nation of navigators, traders, and industrial producers, “driven to actions of immediate practicality”. They left behind many tombs and settlements and some written records. Unfortunately the Etruscan body of writing is distinctive in its paucity of information on the culture whence it sprung. This has rendered the Etruscans as something of a mystery as no one really knows what they were all about.

 

There are traces of the Etruscans all over Tuscany – in Lucca, Pisa, Fiesole, Florence, Arezzo and Siena among many others. At the instance of the English expatriate accompanying us on this tour, we were going to meander through two lesser known Etruscan sites - Murlo and Volterra.
 

 



View of Murlo's countryside from a gateway to the town

 

The main point of interest in Murlo is an ongoing excavation of an Etruscan town and the museum which houses all the artifacts found therein. The museum, like the town itself, is small and well put together but slightly humdrum. The most interesting part of the exhibit is a reconstruction of the roof of a building excavated in the area. Atop the roof sits an Etruscan farmer, a terracotta figure with a wide brimmed hat on his head. He looks like a cowboy raring for a fight. The rest of the artifacts on display were some funerary urns, everyday utensils, some gold jewelry and other items of daily life. It is highly apparent  from these artifacts that the area was an agricultural center then as it is now.  After an hour of browsing we were all quite hungry, so we decided to eat in the one and only restaurant in town. Surprisingly we had a great meal in the middle of nowhere. Then it was off to Volterra.

Aerial view of Murlo

 

 

On top of the reconstructed rooftop, an Etruscan cowboy sits in the middle

  

Yippee-yayo-kayay!

 

 

Volterra, like many Etruscan cities, sits atop a plateau with uninterrupted views of the surrounding hills. It boasts of the Duomo; the Museo d’Arte Sacra; the Teatro Romano; the Arco Etrusco; and the Pinacoteca e Museo Civico housing works by Ghirlandaio, Signorelli and Fiorentino. The main attraction, however, is the Museo Guarnacci. It contains one of the best collections of Etruscan artifacts in Italy, gathered from numerous local tombs. Amongst a plethora of artifacts, there are 600 funerary urns offering unique insight into Etruscan customs and beliefs. One is called the “Married Couple” owing to the elderly couple sitting atop the urn, realistically portrayed with haggard, careworn faces. Another room contains the elongated bronze known as the Ombra della sera or “Shadow of the Evening”. This name was bestowed by the poet, Gabriele d’Annunzio, who said the bronze reminded him of “the shadow thrown by a human figure in the dying light of the evening”. It may be a votive figure but it is difficult to say with certainty; it was cast with no clothes or jewelry to indicate rank, status or date. It is only by chance that this remarkable figure has survived. It was turned up by a farmer ploughing his field in 1879 and used as a fire poker until someone recognized it as a masterpiece of Etruscan art.

 

Panoramic view of Volterra and its surrounding countryside

The view from the hills of Volterra

 

 

Sidewalk cafes, narrow streets, museums and lots of tourists

 


 

The Teatro Romano



Volterra's Duomo

The façade of the Museo Guarnacci

Despite the many traces of the Etruscans still extant, the fact is that theirs was a weak culture which retreated when stronger civilizations came along. A culture that professes to divine the will of the gods by reading the entrails of eviscerated animals can hardly be expected to conquer the world. Their more aggressive neighbors, the Romans, did and swallowed them up in the process. The result of this retreat was an almost complete obliteration of Etruscan culture.

 

“The Etruscan world remained extraneous to the rational order of classical thought. In its last phases, beginning in the 4^th century BCE, the Etruscan nation withdrew into itself in its archaism and its provincialism, dominated above all by the elaboration of a complex religious thought and by the minuteness of its rites. When Greece had reached the peak of the inimitable creativity of classicism, declining Etruria remained behind, bogged down in its traditions, impoverished in technique.”

 

A portion of the Guarnacci's collection of cinerary urns



Married Couple
 

A beautifully realized cinerary urn

 

Etruscan jewelry

This could be a Greek vase to my untrained eyes.
 

 

The Ombra della Sera, "The Shadow of the Evening", once used a fire poker

 

My curiosity about the Etruscans more than satisfied, we left Volterra tired and dispirited even

though the day was far from over and the sun was still high up in the sky. I think we were all suffering from “funerary urn fatigue”. Six hundred of them in one sitting is almost too much for one human being to bear; after all they were used to contain dead bodies. But my spirits lifted when from the corner of my eye, I saw a poster advertising (in script which leapt out of the page) an exhibit of torture and its many hideous instruments. Now there’s something to sink my teeth into!

 

 

Whahahahahaha! Ouch.