Why so little is left standing
The Etruscans built in stone where it had to carry weight: foundations, platforms, city walls. Above that they used timber, and they dressed the timber with fired clay. Wood rots and clay breaks, so what survives of an Etruscan temple is usually a platform of tufa blocks and a pile of terracotta fragments. On the Capitol in Rome, the foundations of the temple of Jupiter, built on the Etruscan plan in the sixth century BCE, are still there, in blocks of tufa; the building they carried has gone.
The Tuscan temple, by the numbers
The best description comes from a Roman. Vitruvius, in his treatise on architecture, gave the rules for what he called the Tuscan temple. Take a rectangle six parts long and five wide. Give the front half to the columns, the back half to the rooms of the gods. Divide the width into ten: four parts for the central room, three on each side for two smaller rooms or for open wings. Make each column one-seventh as thick as it is tall, and as tall as one-third of the temple’s width.
The result is a building with a clear front and back. You climbed steps at the front, crossed a deep porch full of columns and reached the doors of the cellae, sometimes three of them for three gods, as on the Capitol. Unlike a Greek temple, it was not meant to be walked round. The roof sat on paired wooden beams, and Vitruvius adds a practical detail: leave a gap of two inches between the beams, because timber that touches heats up and rots. The eaves projected far beyond the walls, about a quarter of the height of a column, probably to keep the rain off the clay and timber below.
A roof full of statues
The Etruscans also placed statues on the roof itself. In the late sixth century BCE the temple at Portonaccio, near Veii, had life-size terracotta statues standing along its ridge, among them the Apollo of Veii, almost two metres tall, made by sculptors of the workshop of Vulca. The same workshop made the statues for the temple of Jupiter in Rome. Seen from below against the sky, painted in bright colours, they made the roof the most visible part of the building.
Houses: read them in the tombs
Etruscan houses have almost vanished, but their image survives underground. At Cerveteri, many tombs in the Banditaccia necropolis were carved in the rock in the shape of huts or houses, with a wealth of structural detail, and they are the only surviving evidence of Etruscan domestic architecture. A family tomb could be carved to look like a house, with the objects of daily life around the dead. Elsewhere tombs show Etruscan builders solving harder problems: at Volterra, round tombs of the sixth century BCE have vaults made of concentric rings of stone, held up by a central pillar.
Cities on a grid, behind walls
The Etruscans were among the first in the Mediterranean to lay out towns on a grid, a practice the Romans copied. The clearest example is Kainua, at Marzabotto near Bologna, founded around 500 BCE: a wide north-south street crossed by three east-west streets, long blocks of houses and workshops, two large temples to Tinia and Uni in the north-east quarter. Under its central crossroads the builders buried a pebble marked with a cross aligned to the cardinal points, as if to fix the town to the four quarters of the sky.
Hill cities needed walls. Tarquinia was ringed by an imposing circuit, now excavated; at Volterra the walls were enlarged in the fourth and third centuries BCE and two Etruscan-Roman gates still stand. In those gates you meet the arch, which Rome would later use on a far larger scale.
Where to see it
In Rome, the foundations of the Capitoline temple are in the Palazzo dei Conservatori of the Musei Capitolini, and the statues from the roof at Portonaccio are at the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia. The winged horses of the Ara della Regina are in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Tarquinia. For a whole town, go to Kainua at Marzabotto; for walls and gates, Volterra; for houses of the dead, the Banditaccia necropolis at Cerveteri.
Sources
- Vitruvius, On Architecture 4.7 (LacusCurtius).
- Musei Capitolini, “Foundations of the temple of Jove Capitoline”; Turismo Roma, “Temple of Capitoline Jupiter”.
- Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, record of the Apollo of Veii.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Etruscan Necropolises of Cerveteri and Tarquinia” (1158).
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Etruscan art”, “Tarquinia”, “Volterra”, “Veii”.
- Ministero della Cultura, “Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Tarquinia”; Città metropolitana di Bologna, guide to Kainua.
