François Tomb

Feel the change in the air as you go down the cut in the rock. The warm wind of the Maremma plain stays behind you, and the walls on either side turn cool and slightly damp. This is tufa, the soft volcanic stone of southern Etruria. It is porous and grainy, and it carries the marks of tools that were swung here more than two thousand years ago. Somewhere above you, birds call over the fields. Down here, the sound goes flat and close.

You are standing at the François Tomb, in the ancient territory of Vulci, inside the countryside of Montalto di Castro. This was once one of the great cities of the Etruscans. The Etruscans were the people who ruled much of central Italy before Rome rose to power. They wrote in their own language, and they built cities of the living on the hilltops. Their dead lay in cities of their own, carved into the rock below.

The tomb belongs to the Ponte Rotto necropolis, one of several burial grounds that ring the old city. The name means "broken bridge". The Fiora river runs nearby, through a gorge lined with oak and scrub. The land here is quiet now, mostly pasture and wheat. In the Etruscan age, though, Vulci was rich. It traded across the Mediterranean, and its tombs filled with painted Greek vases that are now spread through museums across Europe.

The tomb takes its name from Alessandro François, an archaeologist from Florence who opened it in 1857. He was digging in partnership with the French scholar Adolphe Noël des Vergers. What they found inside was not a simple grave. It was a full underground house for one aristocratic family, with a long entrance passage, a central hall, and a series of chambers branching off on each side. Here is the first surprise: several generations of one family lay here, over a long span of time.

That entrance passage is worth a moment of attention. Archaeologists call it a dromos, a Greek word for a corridor that leads into a tomb. It slopes down into the hillside, and the walls rise higher as you go deeper. The effect is deliberate. Every funeral procession walked this same route, out of the sunlight and into the dark. Look at the floor and the walls as you go. The surfaces are rough in some places and smoothed in others, the work of many hands.

Inside, the plan follows the shape of an Etruscan home. The central space works like a hall where a family would receive guests. Smaller rooms open from it, and the ceilings are carved to copy the beams and slopes of a wooden roof. The Etruscans did not think of a tomb as an empty hole. They thought of it as a dwelling. The dead were given furniture, food, and company, all shaped out of the living rock.

The real fame of this tomb comes from its paintings. Around the fourth century before Christ, artists covered the walls of the main hall with frescoes, in reds, ochres, blacks, and blues. And now the second surprise. Most of what you would expect to see on these walls is no longer here. In the 1860s, the paintings were cut away from the rock and carried off to Rome, into the private collection of the Torlonia family. What visitors see today are traces, outlines, and reproductions.

It is worth knowing what those paintings showed, because they are among the most important images the Etruscans left behind. One wall showed a scene from Greek myth. Achilles, the hero of the Trojan War, kills Trojan prisoners at the funeral of his friend Patroclus. Beside him stood two figures of the Etruscan underworld. One was Charun, a demon with a hammer. The other was Vanth, a winged female guide of the dead. The scene is violent, and it was meant to be.

Facing that myth was something rarer: a scene from Etruscan history. Armed men from Vulci free a captive, Caile Vipinas, and kill their enemies in a surprise attack. The rescuer is named Macstrna. Among the dead is a man labelled Cneve Tarchunies Rumach, which means Gnaeus Tarquinius of Rome. This painting is a sort of Etruscan war memory. It tells of a time when Etruscan warlords fought over Rome itself, long before Rome ruled them.

This connects to a famous Roman voice. The emperor Claudius was a keen student of Etruscan history, and he wrote about it at length. In a speech that survives on a bronze tablet found in Lyon, he says that the Etruscans knew Servius Tullius, an early king of Rome, by the name Mastarna. That is almost the same name as the hero on these walls. Historians still argue about the link. But the painting and the emperor seem to remember the same story from two sides.

The man who commissioned all this also appears in the paintings. His name was Vel Saties, and he was shown in a richly decorated robe. Beside him crouched a small figure, often read as a servant or a young attendant, holding a bird on a string. Some scholars think the scene shows Vel Saties about to read the flight of the bird. The Etruscans were known across the ancient world for reading omens in birds, lightning, and the organs of animals.

When you leave the tomb, the wider landscape of Vulci opens again. The archaeological park nearby holds the remains of the city itself, with roads, temples, and houses. To the north, an old bridge crosses the Fiora gorge, and a small castle beside it now holds a museum of finds from the area. If you have time, the walk between these places helps you understand the tomb. The family down in the rock looked out over a working city full of trade and noise.

As you climb back up the passage, notice how the light grows warmer with each step. The tufa turns from grey to gold. The sound of the wind and the birds comes back. The Etruscans who walked this way left their dead below and returned to the fields, the river, and the city on the hill. You are walking the same slope now. Take a last look behind you, into the cool dark, before the open sky of the Maremma takes over again.