Word: etruscans
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When Rome was little more than a cluster of hill villages and the Forum a swampy marketplace, the proud and pleasure-loving Etruscans ruled Italy from the Tiber to the Po. In the end, the Roman legions crushed the loose confederation of Etruscan city-states and razed their walls. Etruria's bizarre hobgoblin world of superstition, ritual and magic provided the folk mythology from which poets from Virgil to Dante evoked their images of Hades and Hell; its art was buried in underground tombs to await latter-day grave robbers...
Even today, Romans prefer to dwell on the grandeur of classic Rome rather than recall the Etruscan kings, who, as Livy reminded them, could once make the Roman Senate tremble. But tucked away in a corner of Rome's Villa Borghese park is one of the world's richest collections of Etruscan art, which each year is drawing increasing numbers of visitors. Housed in the massive Villa Giulia, built in 1555 as a papal summer resort, the collection today numbers bronzes, terra-cotta sculptures and artifacts in the tens of thousands, displays its choicest treasures in two floors...
...flap-footed, tank-bearing skindivers have opened a new frontier in archaeology. Last week Piero Nicola Gargallo, 30, a skindiving Italian marquis, was telling how he found the ancient Etruscan seaport of Pyrgi. On the Tyrrhenian coast just north of Rome, the city is known from historical records, but only minor traces have been found on dry land...
Little is known about the Etruscans, a talented, highly civilized people who ruled Rome from about 600 B.C. to 500 B.C. The Etruscan written language has not been deciphered, and even the origin of the people, supposedly in Asia Minor, is known from tradition only. The Romans took over much of their culture but were ostentatiously shocked by their sexual customs, e.g., Etruscans sometimes made love at the dinner table, and young girls earned their dowries by prostitution...
Most of these drowned cities are unexplored and unaccounted for. No one knows how their ruins got so deep underwater; the general level of the Mediterranean has risen only a fraction of an inch since glacial times. Gargallo hopes that his underwater ruins may hold the answer to some Etruscan mysteries. "Water," he says, "is destructive, but it can also preserve. Mud gives protection from time, weather and greedy hands. If the sea bottom is undisturbed, some relics last almost indefinitely...