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Today on Photo Friday, Susan Sanders treats us to a trip out of Rome and a view of those mysterious Etruscans! The photographs she presents depict the Banditaccia Necropolis at Cerveteri, about an hour’s drive from the center of the Eternal City.

Above, we see curious visitors admiring a huge tumulus or burial mound, the most noble form of Etruscan burial at the site. Below, we see row tombs that look a bit like suburban houses, neatly lined up one beside the other.

If you’ve never visited the necropolis and museum at Cerveteri, the trip is well worth the time, as the dramatic site is both haunting and romantic. In a visit shortly after World War I, D.H. Lawrence describes the experience of climbing into a tomb cut into one of the many huge tumuli, such as that depicted above:

There is nothing left. It is like a house that has been swept bare: the inmates have left: now it waits for the next comer. But whoever it is that has departed has left a pleasant feeling behind them, warm to the heart….

They are surprisingly big and handsome, these homes of the dead. Cut out of the living rock, they are just like houses. The roof has a beam cut to imitate the roof-beam of the house. It is a house, a home.

Such are the Etruscan tombs at Cerveteri. Though they have long-since been emptied of artifacts, archaeologists see their interior structure as indicative of the houses in which noble Etruscans once lived (very few Etruscan houses have been excavated, as the Etruscans lived on the same hilltops that are now the sites of Italy’s most charming hilltowns). As such, a visit to Cerveteri provides excellent insight into Etruscan life and afterlife.

For more compelling photos of Cerveteri, visit Susan’s photo blog: Rome With A View.