Chiusi

To the Etruscans it was Clevsin, to the Romans Clusium, and it was one of the twelve cities of the league: in the sixth century before Christ it stood first among them, in the time of the lucumo Porsenna, the one who in 506 before Christ laid siege to Rome. Under the town run tunnels dug between the sixth and the fifth century before Christ, probably to carry off the rainwater: they call them the labyrinth of Porsenna, and Pliny the Elder wrote that the labyrinth was part of a monument that included the king's tomb. The mound of Poggio Gaiella may have been made for him. The wealth of the city lies in its tombs: chambers cut in sandstone, sarcophagi and urns of alabaster, and a great import of Attic pottery which Chiusi redistributed through the whole of inner Etruria, alongside the bucchero made at home.

In 87 before Christ Clusium became an important Roman municipium. In the year 107 the road they called the Traiana Nova was completed, from Bolsena to here, and its milestones did something done nowhere else: instead of the distance from Rome they gave the distance from the boundaries of Chiusi, a fines Clusinorum. Then the city shrank. The Romans told of an Arruns of Chiusi who called in Celtic mercenaries from the Po valley to settle a private matter concerning his wife, and the Celts sacked the city and settled in the region. In the Middle Ages malaria emptied the valley, and it did not recover until the Valdichiana was drained, in the seventeen hundreds. The cathedral of San Secondiano was built around the year 560 over an older basilica, with marble columns taken from ancient buildings; its bell tower, which stands apart, was turned into a defence tower in 1585, and underneath it there is a Roman cistern.