Short answers, pulled from the story.
Modern archaeologists and geneticists have established that the Etruscans were an indigenous population of central Italy, not migrants from Lydia or the eastern Mediterranean. A 2021 study in Science Advances sequenced the DNA of 48 Iron Age individuals from Tuscany and Lazio and found the Etruscans were autochthonous with a genetic profile close to their Latin neighbors and no trace of recent Anatolian admixture.
The Etruscans called themselves Rasenna, meaning "the people", a name recorded by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the first century BC. The autonym is preserved in boundary inscriptions such as Tular Rasnal ("boundary of the people") and civic texts using the form Mechlum Rasnal ("community of the people").
The Etruscans spoke a language that is classified as a language isolate, related only to the other members of the Tyrsenian family (Raetic and Lemnian) and unconnected to any other known language group. Around 13,000 inscriptions have been found, attested from 700 BC to AD 50, but the language remains only partly understood because most inscriptions are brief epitaphs and the literary tradition has almost entirely disappeared.
The Etruscan League, also called the Dodecapolis or Etruscan Federation, was an alliance of twelve city-states active between roughly 600 BC and 500 BC. Cities believed to have been members include Arretium, Caisra, Clevsin, Curtun, Perusna, Pupluna, Veii, Tarchna, Vetluna, Volterra, Velzna, and Velch. The league met annually at the Fanum Voltumnae at Volsinii, where a leader was chosen to represent it.
Rome adopted Etruscan writing in the middle of the 7th century BC, which became the Latin alphabet. The fasces, the primary symbol of Roman state power, the toga palmata, the sella curulis, and augury and haruspicy were all absorbed from Etruscan practice. Rome's first urban infrastructure, including its drainage system, was built under Etruscan influence, and the names of at least two Roman tribes, Ramnes and Luceres, appear to be Etruscan in origin.
Etruscan civilization was gradually absorbed by Rome through the Roman-Etruscan Wars. Etruscans were granted Roman citizenship in 90 BC. By 27 BC, the entire Etruscan territory had been incorporated into the newly established Roman Empire. Etruscan inscriptions ceased to appear from the early 1st century AD.