In the stone chests of Cafaggio the grave goods say who lay inside: earrings, rings and terracotta spindle whorls in the women's burials, helmets, swords and javelins in the men's. And they say who those dead traded with: the black-gloss pottery that caps the urns is Etruscan work, the jewellery comes mostly from Lazio, the weapons from the Po plain and carry decoration in the Celtic manner. This is a burial ground of the Apuan Ligurians used for a very short time, the last quarter of the fourth century BC, until a landslide forced its abandonment; the settlement it served has never been located.
What to see
The excavations, begun in 1976 and continued in later campaigns, have brought to light 54 tombs set out in two alignments, closed to the south by a wall. Each monument is a drystone enclosure marking off a burial area, in all likelihood tied to family bonds, and contains one or more chests built of slabs quarried from a nearby headland. Inside lay the ossuary vase with the ashes, table pottery, weapons and ornaments; above, a cairn of stones served as a marker. In all, the remains of about 80 individuals have been identified.
The detail that stays with you is the bowl: almost every cinerary urn is closed by an upturned dish in black-gloss ware, an Etruscan product bought on the market and reused for the funeral. The same way of organising burials by enclosures occurs in Liguria from the Iron Age onwards, for instance in the cemetery of Chiavari. Much later, between the first and second centuries AD, the area was used for burial again: those graves have no grave goods, however, and without grave goods they cannot be dated precisely.
Visiting
The site lies at Ameglia, in the province of La Spezia, at the foot of the Costa Celle hill, not far from the mouth of the Magra. It is an open archaeological area rather than a museum with opening hours: before setting out it is worth checking the state of access with the municipality of Ameglia. We are a few kilometres from Luni, the colony Rome founded in 177 BC, and the closeness is no accident: putting the two stops in the same day is the best way to grasp what happened here.
Our editors' tip
Read the passage in Livy first: around 180 BC Rome deported more than 45,000 Apuan Ligurians to Samnium to end a resistance that had lasted for decades, and three years later founded Luni. With that figure in mind, the enclosures of Cafaggio stop being lines of stone and become what was left of a community wiped out within a generation.