Necropoli della Banditaccia

A short drive inland from the Tyrrhenian coast, the Banditaccia preserves the burial grounds of ancient Caere on an extraordinary scale: tumuli, cube tombs and deep funerary avenues spread across roughly twenty hectares, inscribed by UNESCO, together with Tarquinia, as testimony to the Etruscan way of shaping a city for the dead.

Why it matters

Etruscan Cerveteri, known to the ancient Mediterranean as Caere, was a maritime power whose wealth is legible above all in the ground around it. The Banditaccia, on a plateau outside the medieval town, is the largest of the city's cemeteries and among the most extensive funerary landscapes of the classical world. Burial began here in the ninth century BC with wells and trench graves, and the ground stayed in use into the Hellenistic age, so a walk through the site moves through nearly a thousand years of changing customs. What sets it apart is urban ambition: the tombs align along straight tuff-cut avenues with junctions, squares and quarters, reproducing in stone the layout of a living settlement. With the painted necropolis of Tarquinia, it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2004, an honour the park's own administration and the municipality of Cerveteri both record for this site.

What to notice

Begin at the mounds. The great tumuli of the seventh century BC are cut straight into the tuff, their chambers arranged around a central pillar with ceilings and doorways that imitate beams, rafters and the doors of domestic houses; the archaeology park underlines this deliberate echo of home architecture. Along the way-marked avenues, look for the tombe a dado: cube-shaped house tombs of the sixth century BC, lined up in regular rows like a built street, some with simulated door frames and relief decoration. The Via degli Inferi and the long funerary way carved more than two kilometres through the rock give the scale away better than any figure. Do not miss the Tomba dei Rilievi inside the fenced enclosure, whose stuccoed interior is treated in its own guide; nearby, the park's literature also points visitors to the tombs of the Alcova, the Sarcofagi, the Triclinio and the Tamsnie in the so-called quarter of the Comune. Wear shoes that grip: the avenues are packed earth and rock, shaded but uneven.

Context and history

The cemetery grew with Caere itself. The earliest graves, wells holding biconical urns and trenches for inhumed bodies, belong to communities of the Villanovan tradition. From the seventh century BC, as inhumation prevailed, ruling families raised the great tumuli, and the goods their chambers surrendered, imported from the Near East and Greece, tell of Caere's far-reaching trade. In the sixth century the city's builders shifted to the disciplined geometry of dado tombs and ditch-roofed graves set along formal streets; by the fourth century, simpler single-chamber hypogea with benches along the walls served broader households, though aristocratic families still commissioned exceptional monuments such as the Tomba dei Rilievi. Caere's decline drained the necropolis of new burials, and for centuries the mounds slept under scrub until excavation from the nineteenth century onward returned them to view. The Archaeological Park of Cerveteri and Tarquinia (PACT), an autonomous institute of the Ministry of Culture, now manages the site together with the Cerite Museum in town, and the finds recovered here form the core of that museum's collections.