Cerveteri

The Banditaccia is a city built for eternity: the Etruscan necropolis of Cerveteri, a UNESCO site since 2004, lines up for kilometres its grassy tumuli and funerary streets where you walk as in a town — because a town is what it meant to be, its chambers cut to imitate the houses of the living. Between the two cities, that of the living and that of the dead, ran the via degli Inferi, cut deep into the tufa. From here comes the Sarcophagus of the Spouses, found in the eighteen hundreds and now at Villa Giulia. The city has had three names: the Etruscans said Caisra, the Greeks Agylla, the Latins Caere — and in the fifth century the poet Rutilius Namatianus, sailing along the coast of Etruria, noted that the name Agylla had by then been lost.

It was among the richest cities of the Etruscan Mediterranean, with its landings on the sea — the chief one was Pyrgi — and a craftsmanship that remade Greek and eastern models in its own way. When the Gauls came in 390 BC, Caere took in the Vestals and the sacred objects carried out of Rome, and its soldiers attacked the Gauls on their way back: for this the Romans gave it citizenship without the right to vote, and according to Aulus Gellius the Caeretani were the first to receive it. Then came famines, invasions and malaria, and between the twelfth and the thirteenth century the people left to found a new village, Cere Novum, which is called Ceri today. Since then the old city is Cere Vetere, that is Cerveteri: the name of this place means «the old Caere», and the distinction between the two is already in a bull of pope Gregory IX of 1236. The centre only filled again at the end of the nineteenth century. The Ruspoli castle stands on the Etruscan walls, and inside the palace is an ornithological museum with three hundred stuffed birds; the Roman baths of the Aquae Caeretanae, gone with the empire, came back to light in 1986. The country of vines and artichokes does the rest.