Tarquinia

• 1. Introduction

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  Tarquinia sits on a long plateau in central Italy, and beneath the ground around it lie the painted rooms of the dead. More than 6,000 tombs have been catalogued in the Monterozzi necropolis alone, and at least 200 of them still carry wall paintings of banquets, dances, sporting contests, and underworld demons. The ancient city was once called Tarch(u)na by its Etruscan inhabitants, and its myths reached all the way to the founding of Rome itself. How did a city on a plateau in what is now the Province of Viterbo shape the rituals, kingship, and religious life of a civilization that would span centuries? And why did it vanish so completely that its last physical remains were torn down in 1305?

• 2. Myth, Oracle, and Origins

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  Tarchon, the legendary founder of the city, was said to be either the son or brother of Tyrrhenus, the figure whose name the Etruscans' sea still bears. A second founding myth belongs to Tages, an infant oracle who surfaced from the earth and gave the Etruscans the disciplina etrusca, a body of sacred knowledge that would structure their religious world. These stories are not incidental color. They reflect how central Tarquinii was to Etruscan cultural identity. Archaeological finds confirm the city eclipsed its neighbors well before written records began.

  The Greek merchant Demaratus of Corinth brought skilled Greek craftsmen to the city, and his descendants eventually became kings of Rome. That chain of influence from a Corinthian arrival in Tarchuna to the Roman throne captures how porous the boundary between Etruscan and Roman culture really was. Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, the fifth king of Rome, demonstrated that heritage through military campaigns against the Sabines and Latins, improvements to the Forum, and the adoption of Etruscan royal dress. His successor, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, helped establish the administrative and social institutions that defined Rome's early structure.

  Numerous Roman religious rites traced their origin directly to Tarchuna. Even in imperial times, a collegium of sixty haruspices, priests trained in the Etruscan tradition of reading omens, still operated there. The city's sacred prestige outlasted its political power by centuries.

• 3. Trade, War, and the Spurinna Era

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  As early as the 8th century BC, Tarchuna's rise as a trading power was built on something practical: control of mineral resources in the Tolfa Hills to the south, roughly halfway to the Caeretan port of Pyrgi. Whoever held those hills held leverage over the coastal trade routes of the Tyrrhenian coast.

  In 509 BC, when the Roman monarchy collapsed and the Tarquins were expelled, the former king Lucius Tarquinius Superbus fled to Caere. He tried first through conspiracy and then through military force to reclaim his throne. He enlisted the armies of Tarchuna and Veii for the Battle of Silva Arsia. The Roman army won, but the historian Livy recorded that Tarchuna's forces fought well on the right wing, pushing Rome's left wing back before the battle turned. After the fighting, the Tarquinian troops went home.

  The late 5th and early 4th centuries BC brought a second flowering, closely linked to the Spurinna family. Their members drove a renewed expansion of Tarchuna's territory and repopulated towns in the surrounding countryside. The Spurinnas' own tomb, known as the Tomba dell'Orco, is decorated with banquet frescoes that include inscriptions identifying the individuals depicted, tying name to face across two and a half millennia. Two broken stone slabs called the Elogia Tarquiniensis honor Velthur Spurinnas and Aulus Spurinnas and offer one of the rare surviving glimpses into Etruscan political history. One inscription there mentions a King Orgolnium of Caere, whose family name recalls Urgulanilla, a woman connected to the household of the emperor Claudius. The Spurinna family's prominence in Tarquinii continued into the 1st century AD.

  At the height of this period, in 358 BC, Tarchuna captured and executed 307 Roman soldiers. The war that followed lasted until 351 BC, ending in a forty-year truce that was renewed for a similar period in 308 BC.

• 4. The Painted Tombs of Monterozzi

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  The Monterozzi necropolis, southeast of the medieval town, holds the oldest evidence of human burial at Tarquinia, stretching from the Iron Age, around the 9th century BC, through to Roman times. The earliest graves were shaft tombs containing cremated ashes in urns, and the oldest among them may predate the Etruscans entirely. Some urns are shaped like huts, and several carry well-preserved paintings.

  Among those paintings are scenes of uncommon range. Banquets and music appear alongside athletic contests, erotic imagery, and mythological subjects. In the later period, underworld demons escorting the dead through the afterlife became a recurring theme, as did processions of magistrates and the insignia of rank belonging to the families interred below. Famous individual tombs include the Tomb of the Bulls, the Tomb of the Augurs, and the Tomb of the Leopards.

  During the second half of the 4th century BC, sculpted and painted sarcophagi made from nenfro, marble, and alabaster began to appear alongside the painted chambers. They were laid on rock-carved benches or propped against the walls of underground rooms that had grown very large by that point. Sarcophagi remained in use through the 2nd century, and they appear in such numbers at Tarquinia that they were almost certainly manufactured in the city itself.

  The Sarcophagus of Lars Pulenas, found among these tombs, carries inscriptions showing the gradual democratic shifts underway in Etruscan society even as aristocratic burial art was at its most elaborate. That tension between ostentatious display and shifting political order is written directly into the stone.

• 5. Rome, Decline, and Medieval Corneto

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  Tarchuna's port, Graviscae, corresponding to the modern Porto Clementino, became a Roman colony in181 BC. Its coastal position was considered unhealthy because of malaria from nearby marshes, yet it functioned as an export point for wine and supported coral fisheries. Classical authors mention the flax crops and forests of Tarquinii's surrounding territory. In 195 BC, the city offered to supply Scipio with sailcloth, a detail that places it in the practical logistics of Roman military campaigns. A bishop of Tarquinii appears in the historical record by 456 AD.

  As Roman authority fragmented, the ancient city contracted. By the early Middle Ages it had shrunk to a small fortified settlement at a location called the Castellina. Meanwhile, a nearby town, Corneto, possibly the same place Roman sources called Corito, grew steadily. It became the dominant city of the lower Maremma coast, particularly after the destruction of the port of Centumcellae, which is now Civitavecchia. The last references to the old city of Tarquinii appear from around 1250, and the final standing remains were demolished in 1305.

  The name Corneto persisted until 1922, when the Fascist government of Italy renamed the town Tarquinia. The reversion to ancient place names was a deliberate nationalist campaign, though the source notes it was not always applied accurately. The renaming restored the Etruscan identity in name, even as the physical city it honored had been erased for more than six centuries.

• 6. The Temples, Walls, and Living City

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  Above the Marta valley, La Civita, the site of the ancient city, sits about 6 km from the sea. It consists of two adjoining plateaux, the pian di Civita and the pian della Regina, connected by a narrow saddle of land. The city walls built during the prosperous 6th century BC ran approximately 8 km in length and enclosed around 135 hectares. Long stretches of the northern section remain visible today.

  The most celebrated surviving structure from the ancient city is the Temple Ara della Regina. Measuring roughly 44 by 25 meters and dating to the 4th-3rd century BC, it was constructed in tufa with wooden additions and ornamentation. Its most famous element is a terracotta frieze of winged horses, a work regarded as a masterpiece of Etruscan art.

  The modern town that grew from Corneto carries a dense layer of medieval architecture. The church of Santa Maria di Castello was built between 1121 and 1208 and shows Lombard and Cosmatesque influences. Its interior features palaeo-Christian capitals and friezes. The Tarquinia Cathedral was rebuilt after a fire in 1643, but retained 16th-century frescoes in the presbytery attributed to Antonio del Massaro. The Palazzo Vitelleschi, begun in 1436 and completed around 1480-1490, now houses the Tarquinia National Museum and its large collection of archaeological finds, including sarcophagi and Greek vases recovered from the tombs.

• 7. Wine, Twin Cities, and Continuity

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  Tarquinia lends its name today to a designated wine zone, the Tarquinia DOC, which produces red and white wines in a frizzante style. Grape yields are capped at 12 tonnes per hectare, and finished wines must reach a minimum alcohol level of 10.5 percent. The red blends require at least 60 percent Sangiovese and/or Montepulciano, with up to 25 percent Cesanese and up to 30 percent from other local red varieties including Abbuoto. The white blends call for at least 50 percent Trebbiano and/or Giallo, with up to 35 percent Malvasia. Pinot grigio is specifically excluded from all Tarquinia DOC wines.

  The town maintains formal twin-city ties with Jaruco in Cuba and Rabat in Malta, connections that link this ancient Italian hill town to the Caribbean and the Mediterranean in equal measure. UNESCO formally recognized the Etruscan necropolises of Cerveteri and Tarquinia as a World Heritage Site, acknowledging what the painted chambers of Monterozzi have always held: a record of Etruscan life, belief, and artistry with almost no parallel anywhere in the ancient world. The frieze of winged horses from the Temple Ara della Regina remains in that record as one specific object that has survived from a city whose last walls fell in 1305.