Excursion to Tarquinia

Tarquinia is a lovely, picturesque medieval town very close to the sea.  It is a walled city and has architecture from the 12th century on.  One of the most beautiful structures in the city is this one:

This is the Palazzo Vitelleschi.  It was commissioned by Cardinal Giovanni Vitelleschi in 1436 and he had the architect design a palazzo that incorporated sections of previous buildings from the 12th and 14th centuries.  It may look a little odd from the outside, but step inside the front gate and you find a little paradise.  So exquisite.  It was transformed into a palazzo in the Florentine style with loggia, center courtyard and well, various upper floors and open cloister-style walks:

It's really very elegant and the photos simply don't do it justice.  Now it is the home of the Etruscan Museum of Tarquinia and houses lots of wonderful and fascinating Etruscan artifacts.  The Etruscans are still somewhat of a mystery.  Discovery of their tombs began in the late 18th century and continue to this day.  Judging from their 'stuff' and their burial practices, they were a very sophisticated society with clear ideas about aesthetics, social structure, grooming, military, literature and mythology.... In fact, scholars are looking into the ways that they might have interacted with ancient Greek and Roman societies and that those societies may have actually adapted Etruscan ways and design.  We know what we know about them based on their tombs.  They believed in the after life and that one's life continues on just as it was down here.  Their bodies were prepared for death and placed in gorgeous sarcophogi with an effigy of the person looking divine.

Then one would be placed in a tomb, deep in the earth, with some of your favorite things, some food and wine, and the tomb would have a door painted on one of the walls as that is the door you are to go through to the other world.  We got to explore some of the tombs.  It was v v groovy.