Outside: a family mark in the landscape
A tumulus (Latin for “mound”) works at two scales. From outside it is a landmark: a round hill of earth that anyone passing could see and recognise as the tomb of a great family. At Cerveteri the tumuli appear in the seventh century BCE, when the ruling families began to raise them over chambers cut into the tufa, and one mound often covers more than one tomb. The Regolini-Galassi mound was about 48 metres across, roughly the length of an Olympic swimming pool, and the Montagnola at Sesto Fiorentino nearly 70.
Many have been worn down. At Tarquinia farming has flattened the mounds over the Monterozzi tombs so far that they are barely visible, although about a century ago more than 600 could still be counted.
Inside: a tomb in four rooms
The Regolini-Galassi Tomb at Cerveteri, found intact in 1836 and dated to about 675-650 BCE, shows how the inside worked. It is partly cut into the tufa and partly built of squared blocks. A corridor, the dromos, leads down to an antechamber; beyond it lies the burial chamber, and two oval cells cut into the rock open off the antechamber on either side. A low wall with a window separated the antechamber from the lower chamber. Each space had its own job: the lower chamber held a woman of royal rank with her gold jewellery, a side cell held the ashes of a man, and the antechamber held a funeral bed, ritual furniture, shields along the walls and three carts.
Domes without arches
How do you roof a round room without an arch? In northern Etruria builders used the false dome, the same principle as the tholos tombs of Mycenae: rings of stone slabs, each one projecting a little further inwards than the ring below, until the gap at the top is small enough to close with one slab. It works like a stack of plates, each pushed slightly further over the edge of the one beneath. The Montagnola, built in the seventh century BCE near Florence, is entered through an open corridor that leads into an inner passage with a pseudo-vault; its chamber rises on a vertical base 3 metres high, and the top is closed by a square slab resting on a pillar. Does the pillar hold up the dome? Apparently not: it does not seem to have a real structural function.
Its neighbour, the Tomb of the Mula, has no central support at all, and its dome, more than 8 metres across, is the largest known in pre-Roman Italy. In the sixteenth century it was enclosed in a villa and used as a wine cellar.
Who was buried, and for how long
The tumulus was a family monument meant to last. Its chambers could take several burials and be reopened when a new member of the family died, and in the Regolini-Galassi Tomb both rites, burial and cremation, meet under one mound. The objects tell the same story of rank. In 1902 a landowner near Monteleone di Spoleto found a tomb under a tumulus with the remains of a bronze parade chariot, now in New York, the best preserved chariot of its kind from Italy before Rome. For the other kinds of Etruscan tomb, from pit graves to cube tombs, the mound was only one choice among several.
Where to see tumuli
The best place is the Banditaccia at Cerveteri, where you can walk between the mounds; the gold of the Regolini-Galassi Tomb is in the Museo Gregoriano Etrusco in the Vatican. The Montagnola and the Mula are in the Quinto Alto district of Sesto Fiorentino, near Florence; access is limited, so check before you go.
Sources
- Vatican Museums, Museo Gregoriano Etrusco, Room II: “Regolini-Galassi Tomb”.
- Museo Galileo, “Montagnola Tomb and Mula Tomb (Sesto Fiorentino)”.
- Ministero della Cultura, “Necropoli della Banditaccia” and “Necropoli dei Monterozzi di Tarquinia”.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Etruscan Necropolises of Cerveteri and Tarquinia” (1158).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, record 03.23.1 (Monteleone chariot).
