oh you silly Etruscans

If I ever get a gig writing a Discovery Channel program about the Etruscans, I'm going to be faced with a serious problem of rhetoric. Either you have to describe the Etruscans as mysterious, cryptic and inscrutable (a riddle wrapped in an enigma, draped in a toga). Or you have to announce that they weren't so odd after all: why, they were just like us, with the eating and the drinking and the dancing and the weird obsession with sheep livers! But on the whole, I'd rather go with inscrutability: after all, that way any precious bits of knowledge that come dripping from my lips will seem all the sweeter.

Still, there are all kinds of reasons why the Etruscans were cool. For starters, their head god (equivalent to Jupiter) was called "Tina". Second, those sheep livers, which were not only a tasty snack but also a reliable way of predicting the future (check out the Piacenza Liver-- a model of a liver used for this sort of haruspicy.) And there's Etruscan tomb painting, which represents a large percentage of all the surviving painting from the classical world.

We went on a field trip recently to Tarquinia, the town in Lazio (an hour or two from Rome) where most of these paintings have been found. It's changed quite a lot since I'd been there last (not the paintings, duh). When I was there last, you needed a guide to show you the sites; now it's a park, so you can go down into the tombs yourself. Here's a shot of what the site looks like above ground:



The vast majority of these tombs haven't been excavated yet. But it should be pretty easy to find them, right? Just look for the huts with the stairways leading into the earth. (I so should have been an archaeologist.)

The tombs themselves are gorgeous. Even though Murphy's Law (with the Italian Bureaucracy corollary) means you'll never get to see the particular tomb that you really want to see most, we were able to get into about a dozen. You CAN take pictures, but the light is lousy, and there's glass in front of them, so most of mine are pretty lousy. Instead, here's a photo from a website about the tombs:



This is the Tomb of the Leopards (which are elsewhere), one of my favorites. The colors are gorgeous, and I love the scenes of partying. Other tombs have different sorts of, um, amusements: there's a scene of a dude tied to a stake, with a bag over his head, fighting a dog. (Poor doggie? Poor dude? Take your pick.) And there's the "Tomba della Fustigazione", which has scenes of kinky sex. Whichever sort of entertainment you prefer, there's a tomb for you, and it probably looks pretty cool.

I was glad to learn, in the town of Tarquinia, that the art of painting hasn't died out. Here's a sign from a salumeria there:



"Here they do me right!" I always thought that kitschy pig iconography was a purely barbecue thing; but it turns out to be a porchetta thing too. Tina bless those Etruscans!