Area archeologica della Civita — Ara della Regina

Across the valley from the painted tombs lies the plateau where Tarquinia itself stood: the Civita, silent and wind-open, still marked by the podium of its great sanctuary. The Ara della Regina temple dominated the Etruscan city; today its terracottas live in the museum, and the plateau keeps the walls and gates of an ancient metropolis.

Why it matters

The Civita is the city behind the necropolis. Its urban aggregate goes back to the tenth century BC, and its most ancient traces are sacred: a natural cavity at the heart of the plateau served as the fulcrum of ritual and institutional activity, with a child burial — an individual marked by the "sacred disease", epilepsy — laid beside it, a find the official texts present as evidence of how this community connected with the divine. Life on the plateau ran unbroken to the second century BC, and in its centuries of power Tarquinia dominated territory reaching to Lake Bolsena.

The monument that gives the site its name is the Ara della Regina, the great temple on the Pian della Regina, whose grandiose proportions, in the words of the official description, measure Tarquinia's importance within all of Etruria. Its surviving decoration is famous: terracotta fragments of the fronton, among them the slab of the Winged Horses, now the emblem of Tarquinia in the National Archaeological Museum.

What to notice

The plateau consists of two flat terraces joined by a narrow isthmus, pointing toward a sea glimpsed between flanking hills. The circuit of city walls uncovered by the archaeologist Pietro Romanelli in the first half of the twentieth century ties the Pian della Regina to the western plateau, where remains of residential buildings cluster; the fortification itself, raised between the late fifth and early fourth centuries BC, ran about eight kilometres and enclosed some 135 hectares.

Visible remains at the sanctuary include the temple's imposing platform and two nearby platforms of squared blocks, oriented differently from the temple. Researchers interpret the latter as a monumentalised cenotaph of Tarconte, the legendary founder whose cult here may reach back to the sixth century BC. The temple's reliefs may depict the apotheosis of Heracles, ancestor of Tarconte, after his cremation — a reading advanced by the archaeologist Giovanna Bagnasco Gianni. A monumental gate, the only one so far identified in the walls, marks an entrance into the ancient city, where buildings use varied masonry techniques.

Context and history

Systematic excavation on the Civita has run since the nineteenth century, and it was Romanelli, in the early twentieth, who clarified the plateau's profile as the Etruscan city and traced its wall circuit. The city's history includes contact with the Greek world from the eighth century BC, urban apogee in the sixth and early fifth, war with Rome between 358 and 351 BC and renewed truces, Roman coastal occupation in the third century, and citizenship after 90 BC.

The end came slowly. In the early Middle Ages the plateau emptied, and in the eighth century AD the bishop's seat moved to nearby Corneto — the medieval town that is today's Tarquinia — leaving the Civita definitively abandoned. Vincenzo Cardarelli, the town's poet, caught its resonance in Villa Tarantola, his 1948 Strega-winning book: the Civita, he wrote, is a natural and landscape mystery, a grand machination of the religious and political imagination of the Etruscans.