National Etruscan Museum, Villa Giulia

Museum · Villa Giulia (Flaminio, north edge of Villa Borghese)Rome,Italy

A pope's summer villa in Rome holding what the Etruscans buried with their dead, including a couple reclining together on a terracotta coffin.

The National Etruscan Museum keeps the best-known object the Etruscans left: a terracotta coffin from Cerveteri, made around 520 BC, with a husband and wife reclining together at a banquet on cushions. She is in front, her hand shaped as if pouring something, and both are smiling. The rooms around it hold what the Etruscans buried with their dead — mirrors, jewellery, cooking pots, painted vases — from the people who lived north of the Tiber before Rome absorbed them. The museum fills a summer villa built for Pope Julius III in the 1550s. Rome learned drainage engineering and road building from the Etruscans, took some of their gods, and had at least three Etruscan kings in its early years before conquering their cities one by one. They wrote with an alphabet borrowed from the Greeks, in a language scholars still only half understand, and almost nothing survives beyond what was cut into tombs and offerings. Behind the museum the garden court steps down through three levels to a fountain sunk below ground level, which is worth walking out to.

Worth knowing

Good to know

One of the great collections nobody queues for — you can arrive in August without a plan and walk in, which is true of almost nothing else on this scale in Rome.
See the sunken garden before or after the galleries, not halfway through — it belongs to the villa rather than to the museum, and it makes more sense looked at on its own.
Look at the hands on the terracotta couple — hers is cupped as if holding something now missing, and the gesture is what the whole sculpture is built around.
Find the gold sheets with two languages on them — Etruscan beside Phoenician, which is one of the few keys scholars have to a language nobody fully reads.

Things to do

1
Come round to the front of the sarcophagus
The terracotta couple is displayed so you can walk around them. Approach from the side first, then come to the front and get down to their eye level. They are looking slightly upward and outward, at the mourners who would have been standing where you are, and both of them are smiling.
2
Go down into the sunken fountain court
Behind the villa the garden drops in stages to a fountain chamber below ground level, with caryatids and running water. Walk down the steps and stand at the bottom in summer: the temperature falls noticeably, which is exactly what a pope built it for.
3
Look at the things Etruscans used every day
Between the famous pieces are the things people actually used: razors, mirrors with scenes scratched into the backs, cooking pots, a chariot, dice. Spend ten minutes only on those. The Etruscans are easier to understand through their tools than through their gods.