Vetulonia

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Panorama of Vetulonia.

Vetulonia, formerly called Vetulonium or Vatluna, was an ancient town of Etruria, Italy, the site of which is probably occupied by the modern village of Vetulonia, which up to 1887 bore the name of Colonnata and Colonna di Buriano: the site is currently a frazione of the comune of Castiglione della Pescaia, with some 200 inhabitants.

It lies 300m above sea level, about ten miles directly northwest of Grosseto, on the northeast side of the hills which project from the flat Maremma and form the promontory of Castiglione.

[edit] History and main sights

Vetulonia has Etruscan origins. Dionysius of Halicarnassus places the city within the Latin alliance against Rome in the seventh century BC. According to Silius Italicus (Punica VIII.485ff), the Romans took their magisterial insignia, the Lictors' rods and fasces and the curule seat, from Vetulonia; in 1898, a tomb in the necropolis was discovered with a bundle of iron rods with a double-headed axe in the centre, and soon afterwards, a grave stela inscribed for Avele Feluske was discovered, on which the fasces were pictued. Pliny the Elder and Ptolemy also cite the town.

The so called Mura dell'Arce (cyclopean walls) date probably from the sixth-fifth century BC, and aerial photography has revealed further stretches, which show the political and commercial importance of Vetulonia, which was famous for its goldsmiths. Under the Roman Empire, however, it shrank to a secondary center, with the northward spread of malaria. Little is known also about medieval Vetulonia: first contended between the abbots of San Bartolomeo di Sestinga and the Lambardi family of Buriano, it was acquired by the commune of Massa Marittima in 1323. Nine years later it was handed over to Siena.

The site of the ancient city was not identified before 1881, and the identification has been denied in various works by C. Dotto dei Dauli, who placed the Vetulonia of Antiquity on the Poggio Castiglione near Massa Marittima, where scanty remains of buildings, possibly of city walls, were also been found. The Etruscan city situated on the hill of Colonna di Buriano, where there are remains of city walls of massive limestone, in almost horizontal courses, was renamed Vetulonia by royal decree in 1887.

The objects discovered in its extensive necropolis, where over 1,000 tombs have been excavated, are now in the museums of Grosseto and Florence. The most important tombs were covered by tumuli, which still form a prominent feature in the landscape.