What is a necropolis?
A necropolis (from the Greek nekros, dead, and polis, city) is a city of the dead. For the Etruscans the name fits almost literally. Each city had its cemeteries outside the walls, and the greatest of them were laid out like towns. At Cerveteri, the Banditaccia holds thousands of tombs arranged along streets, with small squares and neighbourhoods, over almost 200 hectares; at Tarquinia the Monterozzi necropolis covers some 130 hectares with about 6,000 graves cut into the rock. Between them, these two cemeteries have produced most of the important discoveries about the Etruscans.
Why do the cemeteries matter so much? Because the Etruscans left no histories, and the sites excavated are above all cemeteries and sanctuaries. The tombs kept what the cities lost: the plan of a house, the furniture of a banquet, the faces and names of the dead.
From urns in pits to streets of tombs
The Banditaccia shows the whole sequence in one place. The oldest tombs, from the ninth century BCE, are pits holding the ashes of the dead in double-cone (biconical) urns; alongside them, from the same early phases, are trench graves for people buried unburnt. From the seventh century BCE come the great tumuli, mounds of earth over chambers cut into the tufa, built for families of high rank. In the sixth century a new type appears: the tomba a dado, “cube tomb“, lined up regularly along the funerary streets like houses in a terrace.
The two rites, burning and burying the body, could even meet in one tomb. In the Regolini-Galassi Tomb at Cerveteri, of about 675-650 BCE, a woman of royal rank was laid out in the lower chamber with her gold jewellery, while a man’s ashes were placed in a side cell.
Houses for the dead
The Etruscans imagined the afterlife as a continuation of life, so they built and furnished the tomb like a home. Many tombs at Cerveteri are carved in the rock in the shape of huts or houses, with a wealth of structural detail, and they are the only evidence left of how Etruscan houses looked. Inside went what the dead would need: jewellery, games, tableware for the banquet and even food. Objects meant for the grave were sometimes inscribed suthina, “for the tomb”. Coffins and urns carried the full name of the dead, often with the names of father and mother, and for a woman her husband’s, so that relatives could find their ancestors when they came back to bury someone else.
Tombs were used for generations. The Tomb of the Reliefs, built for the Matuna family of Cerveteri, has a bench along its walls for 31 burials and 13 niches for couples, and its walls are covered with household objects modelled in painted stucco.
Painted rooms at Tarquinia
Where Cerveteri teaches how Etruscan tombs were built, Tarquinia shows how they were painted. About 200 of its rock-cut tombs have painted walls, from the seventh to the second century BCE, with banquets, dancers, athletes, hunting and fishing and, later, a darker underworld.
Other regions, other shapes
In northern Etruria the tomb took other forms. Near Florence, at Sesto Fiorentino, the Montagnola is a tumulus nearly 70 metres across, built in the seventh century BCE, with a chamber roofed by a false dome, that is, rings of stone slabs each projecting a little further inwards until they close at the top. A pillar stands in the middle, but it does not seem to hold anything up. Its neighbour, the Tomb of the Mula, has a dome more than 8 metres wide, the largest known in pre-Roman Italy; in the sixteenth century it was swallowed by a villa and used as a wine cellar. At Volterra, round tombs of the sixth century BCE have vaults of concentric rings resting on a central pillar. Whatever its shape, the mound marked the family in the landscape.
In the last centuries, tombs became family vaults full of urns and sarcophagi. Near Perugia the Hypogeum of the Volumnii is an underground burial chamber of the second century BCE; from Chiusi comes the painted terracotta sarcophagus of Seianti Hanunia Tlesnasa, now in the British Museum, which still contained her skeleton.
What the rituals were
No Etruscan text describing a funeral survives, so the rite has to be read from what was left behind: banquet vessels and food in the tomb, personal objects marked for the dead, names carefully inscribed. Over time the mood changed, and death demons joined the family scenes. On a third-century BCE alabaster urn in New York, Vanth, an Etruscan death demon, stands beside Greeks fighting Amazons, an Etruscan addition to a Greek story.
Where to see them
The necropolises of Cerveteri and Tarquinia are a UNESCO World Heritage Site run by the Parco archeologico di Cerveteri e Tarquinia; in October 2026 both were open from Tuesday to Sunday, with a joint ticket. The grave goods are in the museums: the Regolini-Galassi treasure in the Museo Gregoriano Etrusco in the Vatican, others at Villa Giulia in Rome and in the museums next to each necropolis.
Sources
- Ministero della Cultura, “Necropoli della Banditaccia” and “Necropoli dei Monterozzi di Tarquinia”; “La Tomba dei Rilievi a Cerveteri”.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Etruscan Necropolises of Cerveteri and Tarquinia” (1158).
- Vatican Museums, Museo Gregoriano Etrusco, Room II: “Regolini-Galassi Tomb”.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art: T. Huntsman, “Etruscan Language and Inscriptions” (2013); record 96.9.225a, b.
- Museo Galileo, “Montagnola Tomb and Mula Tomb (Sesto Fiorentino)”.
- British Museum, sarcophagus of Seianti Hanunia Tlesnasa (1887,0402.1); Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Perugia”, “Volterra”, “Tarquinia”.
