Tarquinia
UNESCO World Heritage Site (Etruscan Necropolises Of Cerveteri And Tarquinia, Inscribed 2004), With About Two Hundred Painted Chamber Tombs At Monterozzi · Tarquinia, Lazio
Almost everything anyone knows about how the Etruscans saw death comes from a field outside Tarquinia. Several thousand tombs were cut into the rock here between roughly the seventh and second centuries BC, and about two hundred of them were painted inside: banquets with musicians, dancers in a grove, a man diving off a rock, leopards facing each other over a doorway, all in flat bright colour on plastered walls. They are the largest surviving body of pre-Roman painting in the Mediterranean and there is nothing else like them anywhere. You walk across open grass between small modern huts, press a light switch at each one, go down a flight of steps and look through glass into a lit chamber. A handful are open on any given day and they rotate. The town up the hill holds the finds in a fifteenth-century palace, including a pair of winged terracotta horses that are among the best Etruscan sculptures that survive, and almost nobody visits either.
Via Ripagretta, Tarquinia, Lazio, 01016, Italy
NO OPENING TIME HERE WAS CHECKED. The structure: the necropolis opens Tuesday to Sunday, closed Mondays, from mid-morning with a last admission an hour or so before closing, later in summer and much earlier in winter. The museum in the town keeps the same days on its own hours. The state-museum free first Sunday applies to both. WHICH TOMBS ARE OPEN ROTATES FOR CONSERVATION and is not published in advance, so ask at the desk. The old town and walls never close. Confirm before travelling.