A house the family never left
The owners are known because they said so: an inscribed marker, a cippus, inside the tomb names the Matuna, one of the most powerful families of Caere, ancient Cerveteri. Two lions carved in tufa once guarded the entrance. Inside is a single rectangular room with a double-pitched ceiling, like the roof of a house, held up by two pillars. A bench runs round the walls with places for 31 of the dead, and 13 niches cut into it were made for couples, husband and wife side by side.
The tomb was built to be used for generations, with room for couples and their descendants together in one house.
Objects on nails
What gives the tomb its name are the reliefs. They are made of stucco, that is, a fine plaster modelled while still soft and then painted, and they show everyday objects as if they were hanging from nails on the walls and pillars, the nails themselves rendered with surprising realism. The effect is that of a well-stocked house where everything has its hook, like the pans and tools on a farmhouse kitchen wall. Among the household things are others that belong to the world of death and the afterlife, so the room is a home and a tomb at once.
Why stucco, and why a house?
At Tarquinia, families painted their tombs with scenes; at Cerveteri, they built them as houses. Many tombs in the Banditaccia are carved in the shape of huts or houses, and they are the only evidence left of how Etruscan houses were built. The Tomb of the Reliefs takes the idea one step further and fills the house with the family’s possessions. It belongs to the late phase of Etruscan funerary art, when Caere was still a rich, independent city; only in the third century BCE, perhaps after a revolt in 273, was it partly incorporated into the Roman state, its citizens without the right to vote.
Seeing it today
Like other tombs at Cerveteri, the Tomb of the Reliefs lost its contents long ago to the private collection of the Marquis Campana, from which objects passed to museums in Italy and abroad. The painted stucco stays where it was made. To protect it, visitors normally look in through a transparent anti-fog glass screen; in summer 2025 the Parco archeologico di Cerveteri e Tarquinia ran nine special openings, for small groups by booking. In October 2026 the Ministry listed the tomb as temporarily closed, so check with the park before you go.
Sources
- Ministero della Cultura, “La Tomba dei Rilievi a Cerveteri” and “Necropoli della Banditaccia”.
- Parco archeologico di Cerveteri e Tarquinia, special openings of the Tomb of the Reliefs (2025), reported by Finestre sull’Arte.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Etruscan Necropolises of Cerveteri and Tarquinia” (1158).
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Caere”.
