Cerveteri

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A traveler walking out from the modern town toward the plateau called the Banditaccia comes, after a little, on what looks like a settlement seen from a height: rounded mounds of earth, grass-grown, set close along lanes that run between them, and at the lanes’ edges the squared fronts of dwellings cut from the rock. Only there are no living people in it. The mounds are tombs and the dwellings are tombs, and the lanes between them are the streets of a town that was built, across some six centuries, for the dead. The Etruscans who raised it knew their own city by the name Cisra. The Romans, who came later, called it Caere. The town of the living stood on the neighboring height; this was the place they made beside it, and it is the larger and the better-kept of the two.

The city the Etruscans called Cisra

Caere stood on a tufa plateau a few kilometers back from the Tyrrhenian shore, some fifty to sixty kilometers north-northwest of Rome — far enough inland to be defensible, near enough to the sea to live by it. Its roots lie in the Iron Age culture that archaeologists call Villanovan, the earliest phase of the Etruscan world, whose scattered villages on the plateau drew together, across the ninth and eighth centuries BCE, into a single town. By about 600 BCE it had become one of the greatest of the Etruscan cities — in population and in power the equal of Tarquinia to the north, its great rival and neighbor. At its height the inhabited area was many times the size of the small town that now bears the name.

Its wealth came up out of the ground and in across the water. Behind the city rose the Tolfa hills, rich in metal — copper and iron above all — and Caere lay astride the trade that carried that metal out to the Mediterranean and brought the goods of the Mediterranean back in. The city was not landlocked: it held a stretch of coast and a string of harbors, and through them it dealt directly with the Greeks and with the Phoenicians and Carthaginians of the western sea. The chief of those harbors was Pyrgi, the sanctuary-port a dozen kilometers off, where the city kept its great seaward temples; another was Punicum, whose name itself remembers the Phoenician traffic. Through these harbors came the painted vases of Corinth and Athens — Caere was the principal point of entry and distribution for Greek pottery into Etruria — together with ivory, gold, amber, and the worked luxuries of the eastern Mediterranean.

The measure of the city’s standing among the Greeks is a particular and telling fact. At Delphi, the most prestigious of the Greek sanctuaries, the city dedicated a treasury — a small temple-like building in which a state housed its offerings to the god — so that Caere stands as the one Etruscan city remembered to have held a treasury in the Greek sanctuary of Apollo. To keep a treasury at Delphi was to be reckoned among the powers worth reckoning with; the Greeks who told of it gave the city its Hellenized name, Agylla. Around 540 BCE, in the sea-fight off Alalia on the Corsican coast, the men of Caere stood with Carthage against the Phocaean Greeks and came away holding the field — a victory dearly bought and long remembered. Greek craftsmen settled in the city itself: the vivid black-figure water-jars known today as Caeretan hydriae were painted at Caere, in the years around 530 to 510 BCE, by a small workshop of artists who had come west from Ionia, and the type takes its modern name from the city where almost every surviving example was found.

The bond with the sea ran deeper than trade. At Pyrgi, Caere’s chief harbor, the city raised great temples on the shore, and there in 1964 excavators found three thin sheets of gold inscribed in the years around 500 BCE — two in Etruscan, one in Phoenician — recording a dedication to the sovereign goddess Uni, set beside the name of the Phoenician Astarte, by a ruler of Caere. The gold tablets are among the longest Etruscan texts that survive and the surest measure of how closely the city’s gods and the gods of its trading partners were brought together at the water’s edge. That a port of Caere should hold a goddess named in two tongues is of a piece with the rest of the city’s story: a power that dealt as an equal across the western sea.

The city’s independence ended by stages. War with Rome in 353 BCE cost it its coastal territory, and Caere passed into the Roman orbit as a community of Roman citizens without the vote — the civitas sine suffragio by which Rome absorbed its neighbors. The town dwindled across the Roman centuries and shrank in the Middle Ages to the small place that, much later, took the name Cerveteri — “Caere Vetus,” the old Caere. But the necropolis on the Banditaccia plateau was never built over, and it kept, under its grass and its earth, the fullest surviving record of how a great Etruscan city housed its dead.

A city of the dead, laid out as a city of the living

The Etruscans left no literature of their own that survives — no books, no chronicles, no scripture passed down entire. What they have left instead is what they built and what they buried, and at Caere they built, for the dead, on a scale and with a clarity found almost nowhere else. The necropolis of the Banditaccia spreads across some four hundred hectares of the plateau, the largest ancient cemetery in the Mediterranean world, and within it lie on the order of a thousand tombs raised across the centuries from the ninth down to the third BCE. It is not a field of scattered graves. It is a town.

Tumuli at the Banditaccia necropolis of ancient Caere — circular drums of cut tufa carrying domes of earth over the rock-cut chambers beneath. Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0.

The oldest and grandest of its structures are the tumuli — great round mounds, the largest more than thirty meters across, each a domed cap of earth set on a circular drum of cut tufa, raised over chambers hollowed in the rock below. A single tumulus might cover several tombs, the chambers of one family added over generations, reached by a sloping passage cut down into the plateau. Around and among the tumuli, from the sixth century onward, the city of the dead took on a stricter plan: long rows of cube-tombs — squared blocks of masonry and rock, each with its own façade and doorway — set shoulder to shoulder along avenues that were laid out, graded, and drained like the streets of a living town, opening here and there into small squares. A visitor walks its principal way between two unbroken lines of tomb-fronts, exactly as one would walk a street of houses. The planning is deliberate and it is the point: the necropolis is a settlement, and the Etruscans built it as one.

The likeness runs inward, into the rock. The chambers cut beneath the mounds and behind the façades were carved to imitate the houses of the living. Their ceilings were shaped to show the ridge-beam and the sloping rafters of a timber roof, rendered in the solid tufa though no timber was ever there; their rooms opened one from another through carved doorways; along the walls ran benches cut for the laying-out of the dead, shaped like the couches and beds of a home. To go down into one of these tombs is to enter the plan of an Etruscan house, fixed in stone — the surest evidence we have of a domestic architecture whose perishable originals, of wood and mud-brick, have entirely vanished. This is why the place matters so much to the study of the Etruscans: where the houses of the living are gone, the houses of the dead preserve their shape.

The fullest statement of the idea is a single chamber, the Tomb of the Reliefs — in Italian the Tomba dei Rilievi — cut at the end of the fourth century BCE and uncovered in 1847. It belonged, by the inscriptions within it, to the Matuna family, an aristocratic clan of late Caere, and it is unlike any other tomb in the necropolis. Where the painted tombs of Tarquinia carry their household world in fresco on the wall, the Matuna chamber carries it in modeled stucco, raised in relief from the rock and then painted, so that the very objects of a noble household stand out in three dimensions on its piers and its walls. Around the chamber, ranged along the walls, are some dozen niches shaped as funeral beds, complete with their carved and colored pillows. And over and among them, in stucco, hangs the gear of the house and the family: cooking pots and ladles and a knife, a coil of rope, drinking vessels, a folding ivory chair and a curved staff — the lituus — that marked the magistracies the Matuna had held, and the helmets and shields and greaves that marked their standing as warriors. Among the household objects appear the animals of the home, the pets of the family, modeled as part of the furnishing of the room. At the foot of the central niche, beneath the place of the chief burial, the stucco turns to other things: the three-headed hound of the underworld, and beside him a fish-tailed demon gripping a rudder and a serpent — the guardians of the world the dead were entering. The whole is a vision of the home carried bodily into the grave, the rooms of the living reproduced for the dead to go on dwelling in, down to the pots on the wall and the dog at the door.

Behind that vision lies the conviction that gives the whole necropolis its sense. The dead were not gone to nothing. They went on — fed, housed, and furnished, lying on their carved couches in chambers shaped as the rooms they had known, in a town with its own streets set beside the town of the living. The Etruscan reading of death was sober rather than morbid; the painted demons who appear in the later tombs, the hound and the fish-tailed figure of the Matuna chamber, are not horrors but wardens of a passage, the household’s escort into the lord of the dead’s country. The necropolis is a sacred place, the ground where the family endured across the generations, and its planning — the streets, the squares, the houses for the dead — is the architecture of that endurance.

The eternal feast and the household in stone

From Caere comes the single object that has become, for the modern world, the image of the Etruscans themselves. It is a coffin of painted terracotta, near life-size, found in the Banditaccia necropolis and pieced back together from hundreds of fragments after its discovery in 1881 — the Sarcophagus of the Spouses, the Sarcofago degli Sposi, made about 520 to 510 BCE and now in the National Etruscan Museum of the Villa Giulia in Rome. The Sarcophagus of the Spouses, from the Banditaccia necropolis of Caere, c. 520–510 BCE — a married couple reclining together at the banquet of the dead, now in the Villa Giulia, Rome. Gerard M, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

On its lid a man and a woman recline together on a banqueting couch, half-sitting against their cushions, the husband’s arm about the wife’s shoulders, both turned outward with the faint archaic smile of their age. They are at the feast — the banquet of the dead, the eternal meal — and they are at it together, the woman beside the man and sharing the couch as an equal, in a way that startled the Greeks and that tells us much about the standing of women in Etruscan life.

The sarcophagus is twinned. A second coffin of the same kind, a reclining couple of painted terracotta from Caere of the very same years, stands in the Louvre in Paris — close enough in conception that the two are thought to have come from one workshop or one tradition of workshops, the products of a single moment in the city’s craft. Together they are the great surviving statement of the Etruscan way with death: not a body shut away, but a person kept whole, propped at the table, hand raised to greet the guest, dining for ever. What the chambers of the Banditaccia render in their carved beams and benches, and what the Matuna tomb renders in its stuccoed pots and pets, these two coffins render in two faces: the home and its life carried over, unbroken, into the grave.

The recovery of Caere

The modern recovery of the city has been, almost entirely, the recovery of its dead. The living town has left little above ground; the necropolis has given up almost everything we know. Its great finds were lifted early and scattered. The Regolini-Galassi tomb, opened in 1836 — a princely burial of about 650 BCE, heaped with worked gold of astonishing fineness — went to the Vatican. The Sarcophagus of the Spouses and the painted vases of the city passed to the Villa Giulia in Rome and, by way of the nineteenth-century dealer-collector Giampietro Campana, to the Louvre. The Caeretan hydriae are dispersed through the museums of Europe and America. For a century and more the tombs were dug for their contents, and the contents traveled; the place itself stayed where it was.

It is the place itself that the twentieth century learned to read. Systematic excavation of the Banditaccia turned the plateau from a quarry of antiquities into a document — the streets traced, the tumuli surveyed, the chambers recorded as the architecture they imitate, so that the necropolis could be read as the planned town it is and as the fullest surviving picture of how the Etruscans housed their dead and, through them, of how they housed the living. In 2004 the UNESCO World Heritage Committee inscribed the necropolis on the World Heritage List, jointly with the painted necropolis of Tarquinia, naming the two together as the supreme witnesses to Etruscan funerary culture — Tarquinia for its painted chambers, Caere for its city of streets and house-tombs. The committee’s citation rested in part on the town-planning of the Banditaccia, the laying-out of the dead as a community, as a work of creative genius.

That is the standing the place now holds: the Etruscan city whose necropolis is itself a city. Where Tarquinia kept the painted vision of the Etruscan world on its tomb-walls, Caere kept the architecture of it — the round mounds and the squared house-fronts, the carved beams and the benches and the stuccoed pots, the couple at their endless feast — and laid the whole out along streets, building for the dead, street by street and house by house, as it had built for the living.

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