Tarquinia Culture

Tarquinia's culture is unusual in that its defining period ended more than two thousand years ago and is still the thing the town is organised around.

The Etruscan inheritance is not decorative here. This was considered the cradle of Etruscan religion, because the countryside was where Tages was said to have revealed the disciplina; numerous Roman religious rites derived from the city, and a college of sixty haruspices still existed here in imperial times.

The painting is the specific inheritance. Around four hundred painted hypogea survive from between the archaic age and Hellenism, and because Etruscan literature is lost, those walls carry most of what is known about the culture that made them.

There is a cosmopolitan strand running through all of it. Greek workmen arrived with Demaratus; Ionian painters arrived around 530 BC as refugees from the Persian conquest; and at Gravisca on the coast, eastern Greek merchants left dedications to Aphrodite, Hera and Apollo, including the famous cippus of Sostratos of Aegina.

The modern identity is recent and deliberate. The town called itself Corneto until 1872 and only took the name Tarquinia in 1922, reclaiming the ancient city's name for a medieval hill town beside it.