Cerveteri Culture

Cerveteri's culture is defined by a disproportion: a comune of thirty-eight thousand people sits on the corner of a city that was more than fifteen times the size of the modern town.

The Etruscan inheritance is architectural rather than painted, and that is its distinctive contribution. The tombs of the Banditaccia are cut out of tufa and most of them echo Greek architecture — they are built as rooms, with beams, capitals, chairs and, in one case, a whole household's objects rendered in stucco. They preserve what Etruscan houses looked like, which nothing above ground does.

There is a long, uncomfortable second strand: the trade in what came out of them. The tombs were excavated chaotically and illegally over centuries, and the ceramics and jewellery now in museums worldwide left here through that route. It is why the Sarcophagus of the Spouses is famous and why context for much else is lost.

The comune is also unusually dispersed, taking in Sasso, Ceri, Borgo San Martino, I Terzi, Valcanneto, Cerenova and Campo di Mare, which range from inland hill villages to coastal settlements, so "Cerveteri" means several quite different places.

And the name itself is a piece of medieval bookkeeping: Caere Vetus, old Caere, to tell the dead city from the living one.