Mediterranean 3: Tarquinia

Wednesday, June 14th, Linette and I got off our ship in Civitavecchia (chee-vee-tah-VEH-kya), Italy, which is 90 minutes from Rome. But we already saw a lot of stuff in Rome last year and didn’t know what else to see there, so instead, we took a bus 20 minutes up the coast to the little medieval town of Tarquinia (which they pronounced tar-QUEE-nia). It still has a wall around it, and is cute inside.

Wall around Tarquinia, Italy

Streets of Tarquinia

Linette and I walked a few minutes outside of the walled town to get to the Necropolis of Tarquinia, where Etruscan tombs were discovered. The Etruscans are the people who lived in Italy before the Romans, and sort of became the Romans. These tombs were from 700-300 B.C.

They had some stone containers that looked like mushrooms. You take off the lid and inside was either stuff, or cremated people. I forget.

Then we walked down a ramp like this one to our first tomb.

Down deep inside was the tomb. It was cool. It was painted like the inside of a small house, complete with a sloped ceiling, since they believed that this is where the dead people were going to live. The ceiling was all striped like a circus tent, but I believe that was really supposed to represent the beams of wood that held up the ceiling.

They painted scenes on the walls of people feasting, playing instruments, dancing, hunting and chilling.

After that first tomb with the ramp, the others all had stairs going down to a window at the bottom that you’d look through to see the tomb. There was a button on the wall that would turn on the light inside for a couple minutes. (The window was to protect the tomb from the humidity of sweaty tourists).

I thought the art was cool, especially given that it was from 2500 years ago!

There were 17 tombs that we were allowed to look in. There were several more that were locked at the time. And there are apparently a thousand or so in the area that have been discovered, though not all are as elaborate as these.

Here’s a close-up of a dude using a sling to hunt birds and folks in a boat.

And they kept having pictures of people playing a double flute. Not sure how that works, but if you could pull it off, you could make chords!

Linette and I wanted to take a picture by this one flowering tree, but there was nobody there to take it. So we took pictures of each other, and I photoshopped us together!

And then, just to put a fine point on it...

After seeing all of the tombs, we walked back to the walled town of Tarquinia to see all its adorable streets.

And of course we found a gelateria.

A museum in town had cool Etruscan pottery (I think they blacken it and then carve the designs and pictures back off or something).

The museum also had some of the sarcophagi from the tombs, which originally held the bodies. They had a likeness of the person on top, and cool scenes on the front.

They also showed one depiction of where they found all the pots (and bones) in one of the simpler tombs.

They had an awesome winged horse statue from the tombs as well, which was amazing, especially for 500 B.C.

Oops. I accidentally got another gelato at that place. But it’s because they had stracciatella and lemon sherbet and it was hot. So what was I to do?

When we were waiting for the bus back to Civitavecchia, I saw this cat in the parking lot. It appears to be changing the oil.

And here’s the nice English couple who waited for the bus with us. One of the fun things about this trip was meeting new people from everywhere.

Back in Civitavecchia, we went to a cathedral that was nice.

I loved its stained glass windows that told the story of Jesus’ life. Here are a few scenes.

We also visited a little free museum in Civitavecchia.

At that museum, I found a window that induced the most pleasant breeze from outside, so I just sat and enjoyed that for a while.

We walked past the fortress that Michelangelo helped build and all the way to the ship.

We hadn't had any lunch (who has time to eat when there's so much to see?) so we had a "snack" back on the ship (burgers, fries, crepes, and a smoothie). Dinner was two hours later.

That night we played an “escape room” game, along with several other teams, and our team totally won! (Linette was in full-on competitive mode).

It turns out that we made some mistakes, but somehow won anyway. The guy running the game was clearly not taking it too seriously, and kept giving people hints and winking and stuff. It was fun to get to know these people, though. (The couple on the right is from Ireland).

So that was our experience in Tarquinia.