The Poor Cnights of St. Chad will be re-enacting life in the 7th Century when they set up camp at Etruria. The group will provide visitors with a fascinating insight into Anglo-Saxon food, arms and clothing.
The reenactment is part of a programme of Hoard related activities: a stunning selection of around 80 artefacts from the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found, including significant items never before seen in public, are now on display at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, only a small distance away from the field where they were unearthed. This is the first time that the hoard will be displayed in the county in which it was found.
Submitted by Bija Knowles on Thu, 11/19/2009 - 13:26
This week the film The Twilight Saga: New Moonis being released, fuelling vampire mania around the world. While teenagers go completely nuts over the film's hunky vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson) – one wrote 'bite me' on her face as she queued with 5,000 others to see him in London last week – other die-hard fans of the Twilight books, written by Stephenie Meyers, are also descending on the small hill-top town of Volterra, in Tuscany, where some of the action of the film is set (even though filming actually took place in Montepulciano, 70 miles away). As a result, hordes of teenagers have been visiting Volterra – a town with Etruscan roots and its own heritage of Etruscan demons, gods and goddesses associated with death, resurrection and the night.
Volterra was an important Etruscan centre, known as Velathri to the Etruscans. Situated on a Pliocene ridge 541m above sea level, it was a settlement since neolithic times and was then colonised by the Etruscan Velathri tribe during the 8th century BC, while the city wall (7km long) was built in the fourth century BC. The main industry there was based on copper and silver mining, as well as agriculture. It became one of the 12 important Etruscan city states but in the third century BC came under Roman control after the battle of Vadimone in 283 BC. During the 80s BC, the town now known as Volaterrae by the Romans supported Marius during the civil war between Marius and Sulla. After Marius's defeat the dictator Sulla inflicted a two-year siege on Volaterrae, after which the city was sacked. One of the town's important families, the Caecinae, were on good terms with Cicero, who persuaded Sulla to drop his sanctions on the city. An impressive Augustan-era amphitheatre, some fourth century AD baths as well as an Etruscan acropolis, are some of the important heritage sites in Volterra.
J. Paul Getty, one of the wealthiest men of the 20th century, first visited Herculaneum in 1912 at the age of 19. Thus began a lifelong fascination with the ancient world fueled by Getty's imaginary visions of the lives of Roman statesmen and entrepreneurs that he considered his antecedents. Getty purchased his first antiquity in 1939 and by 1955 he had acquired enough ancient art to open a small museum in his ranch house constructed in a canyon.near the famous surfing beaches of Malibu, California.
Getty continued to collect antiquities as well as European decorative art like furnishings used by monarchs like Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Anxious to share his expanding collections with the public, Getty announced plans to construct a new museum complex that would be a reproduction of the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum on 1970.
Submitted by Bija Knowles on Thu, 08/27/2009 - 15:40
A new series of excavations is due to begin at the Etruscan necropolis at Tarquinia, 60km north of Rome. The site is home to Etruscan tombs dating from as early as 700 BC – many of them painted with lurid frescoes depicting exotic wild animals and scenes of Etruscans dancing, fighting and making love. While the locations of over 150 painted tombs are known (not all open to the public), it is thought that there are more to be discovered.
This jem of a musem is housed in Palazzo Vitelleschi, a 16th century palace built by the cardinal Giovanni Vitelleschi. It now holds material from the vast number of tombs and the ancient Etruscan city that were found near Tarquinia. The museum has been refurbished since the 1980s. The ground floor now holds the stone funerary sculptures, particularly the splendid sarcophagi from the tombs of the rich. The most famous exhibit is perhaps the pair of winged horses from the Altar of the Queen. The second floor displays some of the relocated frescoes from some of the more famous painted tombs, which were removed from the tomb interior in the 1950s for restoration purposes.
Six cartoonists were asked to go and spend a week in some of the most evocative Etruscan places in central Italy, such as the tombs at Tarquinia and Cerveteri. The result is a series of cartoons about the ancient Etruscan civilisation that lived between the Tiber and the Arno before the rise of the Roman empire. The six artists are Francesco Cattani, Marino Neri, Paolo Parisi, Michele Petrucci, Alessandro Rak and Claudio Stassi. A collection of their work for this project has been put together in a book, Etruscomix.
Submitted by Bija Knowles on Sun, 07/19/2009 - 16:07
What Have the Etruscans Ever Done for us?
“What have the Romans ever done for us?” is a classic question from Monty Python's Life of Brian (and possibly my favourite Roman-related screen moment of all time). But the Romans too could have asked themselves: “What have the Etruscans ever done for us?” The list would be almost as long as the one reeled off to the irascible John Cleese: language, architecture, engineering, gods, rituals - and much more - were all handed down in one shape or form to the Romans from their Etruscan ancestors. But despite the Etruscans' advanced culture and technical abilities, surprisingly little is known about them. Even the questions of who they were and where they came from haven't been answered with any great certainty by modern historians.
Where did They Come From?
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We know that the emperor Claudius, also an avid historian and writer, wrote a history of Etruria in 20 volumes, although none of it has been preserved.
Submitted by Bija Knowles on Fri, 07/17/2009 - 11:20
Resins from pine and cashew trees, and Egyptian moringa oil: these are the essential ingredients of a rich woman's beauty routine in Italy before the dawn of the Roman empire. The solid, yellow cream was found in an Egyptian alabaster vase belonging to an aristocratic Etruscan lady and is thought to be more than 2,000 years old. The results of a scientific analysis have just been published in July's edition of Journal of Archaeological Science.
Resins from pine and cashew trees, and Egyptian moringa oil: these are the essential ingredients of a rich woman's beauty routine in Italy before the dawn of the 
