RST is pleased to welcome guest blogger Theresa Potenza. Based in Rome, Potenza is an art historian and freelance writer. To learn more about her private tours of Rome
and read her travel and feature stories about Italy check out: www.italywiththeresa.blogspot.it.
Experience the past by leaping into the future. At Banditaccia necropolis at Cerveteri,
digital technology engages raw archaeology. The long dead come to life—well, almost.
The city of Cerveteri, located 28 miles (50km) north of
Rome, was one of the largest cities of the Mediterranean before the Roman
civilization. Its burial site offers a
taste of the complicated Etruscan religion and preoccupation with death and foregrounds
the Etruscans’ skillful and creative construction techniques.
A new technology program at the site, called Fu-touring, enhances an already powerful
in-person experience of a city of the dead.
Inside the technology center you can watch a 20-minute 3-D video
providing just enough background on the people, burial practices, and art of
Cerveteri to put the 25-acre (10-hectare) site into context. Three of the tombs are enhanced inside with a
2-minute video that recreates where objects were placed along the walls, how
the architectural space was carved, who was buried there, how their funerals took
place in that space, and even reconstructs earthquakes and natural disasters to
show how precious terra-cotta vases and other personal items were damaged over
the centuries.
Hundreds more tombs are
available to visit in order to expand your imagination, including 9th
century BC small hut tombs and dice
tombs, resembling shop windows, set along a main road.
The most famous tombs are those of the 5th
century BC, grande tumuli (mounded) tombs
indicating an elite aristocratic class and built to imitate domestic
architecture of the period.
 |
Palazzo delle Esposizioni
April 15-July 20 |
These technological enhancements to one of most unique
burial sites in the world, connected to a leading ancient city on a par with
Athens and Rome, comes at a time when the Etruscan city of Cerveteri is in the
spotlight in Rome. An exhibition at the
Palazzo delle Esposizioni--on from April 15th through July 20th
--assembles some of the best collections of previous archaeological discoveries
from inside these tombs from significant galleries around the world, including
the Vatican Museums, Paris’ Louvre, and the British Museum in London. The
exhibition incorporates some of the most remarkable and well-known finds from
Cerveteri, as well as material recently discovered and never before revealed,
providing new insight into this mysterious metropolis and the remarkably advanced
pre-Roman civilization of the Etruscans.
Theresa Potenza
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