Story: Soft Stones for the Sleeping

From a distance, it looks like a dreadful case of mumps has gripped the land. Thousands of round grassy tussocks—some rather large, some quite small—rise along the ridge, descend the smooth flank of the hill, and still define as vital this ancient land known long ago as Etruria. I come closer, pay my entrance fee, and I stand dwarfed within that green tussock expanse. Surrounded like this I struggle to find my bearings in the vastness of time and space and culture.

Above me, a gust of wind bows the tall stems of a grassy tussock, bending them in timeless waves: the earliest tombs here date to the 9th Century B.C. Long before the birth of Christ, the Etruscans of central Italy were hard at work building this once-mighty city and its sprawling necropolis—a city of the dead—called Banditaccia Cerveteri. Wheat farmers, sheep grazers, and sea-faring merchants, independent Etruscan centers banded together to form the rich and powerful League of Twelve Cities in northern Italy, holding sway over the region until defeated by rising Roman power in the 4th Century B.C. But even under the Roman yoke, this place thrived; it was not until the “barbarians” sacked the Roman world that the city was slowly abandoned.

Like the Romans, the Etruscans only buried their dead outside their city walls; over time, dense and elaborate cemeteries grew outside each city gate. Today, it is these unusual cemeteries that attract people like me, drawn to the complex intersection of death and beauty.

It is the Street of the Gods of the Underworld that runs lengthways through this place. The rounded tussock tombs—domed tumuli with sod roofs—cluster near this main axis, raised above street level by large, perfectly cut blocks made of soft, pale reddish-brown volcanic rock known as tuff. As I stroll along the Street of the Gods of the Underworld, it is clear many have trod this road before: the stone pavers are deeply rutted from the creaking bronze cartwheels that bore corpses in elaborate funeral processions. Did the living wail their mournful lamentations as they traveled this inevitable path, their weeping echoing off the stone walls—alerting their kin in the afterlife to make welcome a new arrival?

The tumuli have entryways; I stoop down, step inside, and am lost in darkness. As my eyes adjust to the disappearance of the Italian sun, before me looms a steep staircase, each step grooved from centuries of footfalls on soft tuff. As I duck my head in descent, I pay silent homage to the modern miracle of electricity that illuminates this dim and startling underground world. At the bottom of the stairs, interconnected burial rooms fan off a central chamber, forming a tomb complex that approaches the labyrinthine.

Long rows of tuff burial beds and wall niches carved in tuff line the walls of each chamber. The Etruscans were most considerate of their dead: they even carved tuff bed cushions so their ancestors could comfortably rest their old and weary heads during their long sleep. Some thoughtful descendants even fashioned an occasional tuff chair for the comfort of their lifeless relatives. I sit down, cross my legs, lean back; they even placed the tuff armrests at the perfect height for ultimate repose. The living took care to adorn their family tombs with bright frescos—bold red stripes seems to have been a favorite motif—and multi-colored stucco reliefs of objects of daily life—even a pair of stucco dice beside their stucco bag; how kind to offer a little sepulchral gambling to while away eternity.

The Etruscans were concerned not only with the comfort of the dead, but also with the details of the dead. Before the entrances to some tumuli still stand “cippi,” low tuff platforms supporting male and female burial markers. Through centuries, each generation added new marks to the count of male and female corpses buried within. A box-shaped burial marker tallied women; a column-shaped marker, the men. Even the tuff burial beds themselves are marked by sex; a peaked sloping roof, presumably that of a house, identifies a woman’s bed of final rest.

Grave goods accompanied the deceased into the afterlife: painted Greek vases, weapons, large belts with metal buckles, metal fibulae and other forms of fine gold jewelry. Simple red clay jars once filled with food offerings for the long journey ahead. But as I peer inside dim burial room after dim burial room, I see only empty tuff niches and empty tuff shelves; such precious and portable objects have long since been removed to museums for safe-keeping, far away from this vast and sprawling now-rural necropolis much too large to safeguard from the inevitable lurking looters.

Family tombs carved from stone. A rich and prosperous people. Put together, these two truths spell ferocious competition. Those on the pinnacle of Etruscan society were able to finance the construction of tombs that proclaim their occupants’s wealth and status, power and privilege even long after their abandonment. As I explore along the Street of the Gods of the Underworld, the wind bending the tall and timeless stems of grass, even I eschew the humble, non-descript, one-room tombs of Etruscan commoners in favor of the elaborate, grand and much more photogenic tumuli of the rich and famous of two millennia ago. The striving of past and present unites us once again in undying commonality.

I imagine those long gone Etruscan elite at the peak of that familiar social pinnacle: they sit majestically on their tuff chairs, recline luxuriously on their tuff cushions, and beam with privileged pride as I gaze in awe—and snap another photograph from yet another angle—documenting the beauty of their clan’s ancient stone monument to the long and final sleep.