Necropoli dei Monterozzi

Under a low ridge facing Tarquinia, stairways drop through rock-cut entrances into painted chambers the Etruscans cut for their dead. More than six thousand tombs dot the hill, about two hundred of them frescoed across five centuries — the Mediterranean's largest surviving corpus of pre-Roman wall painting.

Why it matters

The Monterozzi Necropolis is the burial ground of Tarquinia, one of the twelve leading cities of Etruria, and it preserves something no other site in the Mediterranean can match: the largest surviving corpus of pre-Roman wall painting. The archaeologist Massimo Pallottino called these frescoes the first chapter of the history of Italian painting, and the UNESCO World Heritage Committee listed the necropolis, together with Cerveteri's Banditaccia, in 2004 under criteria (i), (iii) and (iv), citing its wall paintings as the only major testimony to classical figural art of pre-Roman times in the Mediterranean basin.

More than six thousand tombs are known on the hill, about two hundred of them painted. Aristocratic burial chambers were decorated from the seventh century BC to the second, a span that runs through almost the entire life of the Etruscan city on the plateau opposite. A century ago, over six hundred tumuli still rose above the chambers; farming has since levelled the mounds, but the painted rooms beneath survive intact.

What to notice

Each tomb is reached down its own dromos, a narrow entrance corridor with steps that sinks below ground level, ending at transparent glass doors. The doors were cut to fit exactly and keep temperature and humidity stable inside, so look at them as instruments of conservation rather than obstacles. Dim, close and quiet, the chambers reward slow looking.

In the Tomba della Caccia e Pesca, hunters hurl spears from a boat while fishermen work the water below, among dolphins and birds. The Tomba dei Baccanti and the Tomba dei Leopardi show reclining diners, musicians and dancers at funerary banquets. The Tomba dei Demoni Azzurri, named for its blue-skinned underworld spirits, and the Tomba del Fiore di Loto or the Tomba dei Giocolieri each add another register of Etruscan imagery: athletes, jugglers, servants, banqueters and demons sharing the same tight rooms.

Context and history

Tarquinia — the Etruscan Tarkna — stood on the Civita plateau, and its dead were buried in the tufa of the long Monterozzi hill that runs parallel, between the city and the Tyrrhenian coast. The painted chambers belonged to aristocratic families who used banquet scenes, hunting and fishing episodes and processions to display rank and to set the deceased within a continuing life beyond the grave. Painting of this kind is attested from the seventh to the second century BC, which makes the site a continuous archive of changing fashions, rituals and self-representation across five centuries.

The necropolis entered the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2004 as part of the serial property Etruscan Necropolises of Cerveteri and Tarquinia. It is now managed, together with the National Archaeological Museum, by the PACT, the Parco Archeologico di Cerveteri e Tarquinia, an autonomous institute of the Italian Ministry of Culture.