suz in rome



17 agosto 2006

128 cerveteri

On Saturday, Jason and I took a local bus north of Rome to the city of Cerverteri. Cerveteri has been continuously settled since Etruscan times (8th-7th c BC). The modern city is somewhat interesting - there's a really neat castle in the main piazza and apparently there are periodically shows with sharks and piranhas.

We were there mostly for the tombs, so we walked out of the city on a delightful winding country road with practically no traffic, past farms with grape vines and a few friendly dogs. About 20 minutes later, we got to the archeological site. The map below only shows about a tenth of the site.


Cerveteri, originally called Caere, is simply a city of Etruscan tombs. The nicer tombs have 3 or 4 different rooms, and are dug out of these manmade hill structures. There were also a multitude of cheaper tombs - just a single small chamber facing the road. Most of the surviving Etruscan artifacts, including the Sarcophagus of the Spouses (Sarcofago degli Sposi), were found here at Cerveteri.


(above: a view of one of the smaller, isolated tombs)

The guidebooks and websites all called it an 'Indiana Jones' type adventure, and advised us to bring a flashlight. Well, this wasn't exactly true. The best tombs - containing interesting architectural elements such as columns with capitals, cornices, frescos, etc - were illuminated artificially. And the tombs that were dark, spooky, and required a flashlight were usually flooded anyway.

So we didn't get much use out of the flashlight that JG brought from the US, and then the Germans gave him hell for it in his Frankfort security adventure.


(Above: corbelling the passageway into the tomb. Corbelling is considered a primitive type of construction, but it sure has held up better than anything the Romans did. Well, OK. Except the Pantheon, but that structure has definitely had structural interventions.)

All in all, it was a delightful afternoon. At the end of the path through the tombs, there's a little on-site cafe and picnic tables. We had packed lunches, so we bought some cokes and relaxed under the pine trees, enjoying the fresh breezes and sunny spots. At one point I tossed the heel of the bread loaf into the brush and a gray cat burst out of the woods and ran after it and tried to eat it! So we amused ourselves for some time by tossing bread for the cat to eat.