We’re still hitting random villages in the Tarquina/Tuscana/Viterbo area. A couple of days ago we drove up to Vitorchiano – a hilltop borgo (village) just off a main highway near Viterbo. It’s very characteristic of the borgo in this area – narrow, winding streets, houses perched at the edge of steep cliffs of volcanic tufo.…

We took a short drive to the borgo of Barbarano Romano – a small village in the hills to the southeast of our home base near Tarquinia. The village was occupied as early as the late bronze age (17th-18th centuries BCE), during the Etruscan era and again in the middle ages. The city walls and…

The nearby city of Tuscania was once an Etruscan city and currently the home of two eighth/ninth century Romanesque churches. We drove the 30km to the city, went in circles for a half hour looking for parking, and finally found a lot on precisely the opposite side of the city from the two churches. A…

Prior to the Roman’s turning all warlike and conquering three-quarters of the Mediterranean, the Etruscans had an empire in central Italy in what is now parts Tuscany and Lazio. The Etruscan civilization started in roughly the eighth century BCE and lasted until the third century BCE, when they were one of Rome’s early conquests. But…