Museo Etrusco Guarnacci site features

The museum occupies Palazzo Desideri Tangassi, on via Don Minzoni, reached from Piazza dei Priori along via Matteotti and via Gramsci. The entrance is at ground-floor level and there is an internal lift.

The first thing to understand about the interior is that it is arranged by theme, not by date — an eighteenth-century scheme that survives in the urn rooms, so you are walking through a museum that is itself a historical object.

On the ground floor, the first room holds material from the necropoleis of the Badia and the Guerrucia, excavated in 1892 and 1898, with later finds from the Warrior's Tomb discovered in 1996 — a bronze crested helmet and a laminated bronze flask.

The second room is where the range starts to show: a bucchero kyathos from Monteriggioni; bronze votive figurines and jewellery from the tomb at Gesseri di Berignone, given by Bishop Incontri in 1839; and the Stele of Avile Tite, of the 6th century BC.

Room III is 5th-century BC: a carnelian scarab with a Greek inscription carrying its maker's name, Lysandros — a signed object, which is rare — an Attic krater attributed to the Berlin Painter, and the Etruscan Lorenzini Head.

The second floor is the one people remember. Here are the tomb finds of the Hellenistic centuries, and above all the urns, whose lids often carry a recumbent figure at a banquet. In that quantity they stop being objects and become a population: portrait after portrait of people who commissioned their own likeness reclining with a cup.

Room 30 is the one to find if you have read anything about the town: urns made from local alabaster — the stone Volterra has carved since the 8th century BC, used here for the dead. Room 35 holds a 3rd-century Mother and Child, the Kourotrophos Maffei, and fragments of terracotta decoration from a temple façade.

Elsewhere are bronzes and ceramics, mirrors, votive figures, vases, locally minted coins, black- and red-figure vases, mosaic flooring — and the dedicatory epigraph of Volterra's Roman theatre, which records that the Caecina family paid for it.

• The founding donation of 1761 — over 600 funerary urns and a library of more than 50,000 volumes, given by abbot Mario Guarnacci to the public of the city.
• The thematic arrangement — the original displays were organised by theme rather than chronology, and that 18th-century scheme still persists in the cinerary urn rooms.
• The urns on the second floor — thousands, of the Hellenistic and Archaic periods, their lids often carrying a recumbent figure at a banquet.
• Room 30: the alabaster urns — made from the local stone Volterra has carved since the 8th century BC.
• The Ombra della sera — the bronze figure drawn out almost to a line.
• The Urna degli Sposi — a married couple on the lid of their own urn.
• The Stele of Avile Tite — 6th century BC.
• The Lysandros scarab — carnelian, with a Greek inscription bearing the artist's name: a signed ancient object.
• The Attic krater attributed to the Berlin Painter, and the Etruscan Lorenzini Head, in Room III.
• The Warrior's Tomb finds (discovered 1996) — a bronze crested helmet and a laminated bronze flask, with the Badia and Guerrucia material excavated in 1892 and 1898.
• Room 35: the Kourotrophos Maffei — a 3rd-century Mother and Child, with fragments of a temple façade in terracotta.
• The Roman theatre's dedicatory epigraph — recording that the Caecina family, and two consulars among them, financed the theatre at Vallebuona.