Guarnacci Etruscan Museum

Volterra has managed to hold on to a horde of valuable remains from its rich past in one of Italy's most important and fascinating Etruscan museums. Besides the prehistoric section with its Villanovan tombs and some Roman busts and mosaic floors, the lion's share of this museum is taken up with more than 600 Etruscan funerary urns. Most of these date from the 3rd century B.C., but there are some entire tomb finds gathered from as early as the 9th century B.C. The urns -- rectangular boxes about 3 feet long, the oldest ones in plain terra cotta, but most carved of alabaster or other stone with a relief on the front and capped with a lid sculpted with the reclining figure of the deceased -- are grouped by their many styles and types. The effect of room after room lined with these intricate studies on the Etruscans' views of life and death is fascinating. The reliefs and reclining effigies often show a primitive naturalism unmatched even by the Renaissance, and because many of the panels depict the symbolic departure of the deceased to the realm of the dead -- on horseback, in wagons, aboard ships, riding centaurs, driving chariots -- there's room for plenty of touching episodes where friends and family are shown waving their last goodbyes. One of the finest is a striking bit of portraiture: an early-1st-century-B.C. sarcophagus lid carved with the figures of a husband and wife, both very old, somewhat dour-faced and full of wrinkles, but staying together even in death. Also here, among the bronzes, is an early-3rd-century-B.C. votive figure of an exceedingly elongated young boy known as the Shadow of the Evening.