Monterozzi Necropolis site features

The Monterozzi necropolis covers a hill east of Tarquinia and holds about 6,000 graves, the oldest from the seventh century BC. Roughly 200 of the tomb chambers are decorated with frescoes, and those are what the site is for: the largest documentation of Etruscan pictorial art there is, and the main surviving record of how the Etruscans pictured their own daily life, their ceremonies and their myths.

What is above ground

Some of the tombs are monumental, cut into rock and topped by tumuli. There were about 600 tumuli still visible in the nineteenth century; many were razed after excavation, so the hill a visitor walks now is flatter than the one the first archaeologists saw.

What is below it

The tumuli usually covered subterranean chambers carved into the rock, reached by inclined corridors or stairways, and containing sarcophagi, the personal possessions of the dead, and in many cases wall paintings. The subjects on the walls run very wide: rituals, animals, magical themes, dance, musical instruments. The best known chambers are the Tomb of the Leopards, of Hunting and Fishing, of the Augurs, of the Triclinium, of the Blue Demons and of the Bulls.

The sarcophagi

The earliest are carved with the dead lying supine on the lid. The later and far more numerous type shows the figure reclining on the left side, facing the viewer and often holding a libation vessel; sometimes a man displays an inscribed scroll listing his ancestry and the offices he held. From the second half of the fourth century BC, sculpted and painted sarcophagi of nenfro, marble and alabaster came into use, set on rock-carved benches or against the walls of chambers that by then were very large. They are found in such numbers at Tarquinia that they must have been made locally, and their reliefs carry symbolic or mythological subjects often taken from Tarentine models.

The Tomb of the Leopards

It has some of the best preserved frescoes in the necropolis, which is the reason it is the one most often reproduced.

The Tomb of the Bulls

The earliest tomb here decorated with complex frescoes, dated to either 540-530 B.C. or 530-520 B.C. -- the sources differ. It is also one of the rare Etruscan tombs with erotic frescoes.

The Tomb of Hunting and Fishing

One of the best-known painted chambers, and among the clearest evidence for how the Etruscans pictured ordinary life rather than ceremony.

The Tomb of Orcus

Notable for holding the only known pictorial depiction of the Etruscan daemon Tuchulcha -- a single image that is the whole surviving visual record of a figure otherwise known only from texts.

The Tomb of the Blue Demons

From the late period, when the walls stop showing banquets and start showing underworld demons escorting the dead on the journey to the beyond, with scenes in the nether world and processions of magistrates marking the rank of the families buried there.

The Tomb of the Augurs and the Tomb of the Triclinium

Two of the six best-known chambers, carrying the ritual and banqueting subjects that make up the core of the Monterozzi repertoire.

The Tomb of the Whipping

The other of the rare Etruscan tombs with erotic frescoes.

The Tomb of the Baron

Discovered in 1827. Its paintings and wall decorations were reproduced on the walls of the so-called Etruscan Cabinet in the Castle of Racconigi -- a nineteenth-century copy that is now itself a historical object.