Where have those Etruscans gone?

Since the last post on Monday, it has been a fairly quiet week.  On Tuesday we had our language exchange with Crisitiana and her friend Giulia, a delightful 84 year old resident of Trastevere who worked for 20 years as the secretary of Crisitiana's boy friend.  As Giulia does not speak English it was a one way exchange, pretty much all in Italian.  In the evening we celebrated Lynn's birthday for which Bob McConnell cooked up a feast which featured artichokes alla Romana and a spaghetti with scampi.

Wednesday was a down day and except for a session at the golf practice facility we spent the day here catching up on our reading.  Today, after dropping off Bob and Isa at the airport, we headed to Cerveteri to find out what happened to all the Etruscans who used to live there. It turns out that tens of thousands of them were buried in the nearby necropolis.

We spent the morning walking through this incredible city of the dead, taking in a video at the presentation center followed by a tour of three of the more important tombs, including the one where the Euphronius Krater, a marvelous Greek vase was found.

Until recently this was a prized possession of the  Metropolitan Museum of Art, but has now been returned to Italy where it is on display at the Villa Giulia in Rome.  The circular tombs of the necropolis are not built up.  Instead, the tufa around them was carved out to leave a tufa cylinder into which a tomb was hollowed out and then a sodded dome of soil was placed on the top of the cylinder.  An exception was the Rilievi tomb which was dug deeply into the tufa and accessed by a stairway.

The interior of this tomb was by far the most spectacular.