Ten minutes from piazza del Popolo, just outside the wall of Villa Borghese, a low, wide villa opens onto a semicircular courtyard and then onto a garden that sinks below ground level. Inside, in a case in the first wing, a terracotta man and woman lie on a couch and smile.
That couple is two thousand five hundred years old and is the most reproduced piece in the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, the museum the Italian state devotes to the Etruscans. School parties come here and specialists come here, and in between, oddly, almost nobody else: it is a quarter of an hour on foot from the National Gallery of Modern Art, and the two together do not add up to the half-hour queue you find at the Colosseum.
Eight pieces are enough to cross it, from the ground floor to the piano nobile, and the last one is not Etruscan and is not even an object. The museum, though, is in the middle of a rehang: right now three of the eight are off view, because their rooms are closed, and the Sarcophagus can only be seen from a distance. Each section tells you since when, and what you can see.
What can we know about a people whose writing we can barely read?
Let’s begin!
A pope’s villa, and the museum that ended up inside it
The villa began as a country house. Julius III had it built between 1551 and 1553, right after his election, on land he had owned as a cardinal, and Vignola, Bartolomeo Ammannati and Giorgio Vasari worked on it together, Vasari finalising the design in consultation with Michelangelo. It was made for days out of town: the pope left the Vatican by boat, went up the Tiber to his vineyard on the river and walked the last stretch.
The museum moved in in 1889, when the new unified state was looking for a home for the pre-Roman material of Lazio, southern Etruria and Umbria. It was a lucky choice, for a reason you notice as you walk. The rooms are small, bright and in a row, and a whole grave group fits into one of them without being split between cases at opposite ends of a building.
Keep that in mind when you arrive, because it changes how you visit. You do not walk around ten isolated masterpieces here: you follow places, one Etruscan city after another, Vulci, Cerveteri, Veii, Pyrgi, Palestrina. If you get lost, your compass is the name of the city written at the entrance to each room.
1. The Sarcophagus of the Spouses
The sarcophagus comes from the Banditaccia necropolis at Cerveteri, where it was found in 1881 in some four hundred fragments, and it dates to 530-520 BC. It is a little over two metres long. On the lid two almost life-size figures lie stretched out, a man and a woman on the same banqueting couch, in painted terracotta, modelled separately and fired in four pieces.
Why is a couple lying down together a piece of news?
Because in the Greece of that same century a wife did not take part in the banquet, and on a Greek relief you would not find her on that couch. Here the woman is in front, in the position of the one who counts, with the same smile and on the same scale as her husband. It is from this object, more than from any text, that the idea of an Etruscan society in which women had a public place comes.
Look at the hands. They are open, the fingers bent forward, and they hold nothing: they once held objects now lost, and the gesture points to the funerary rite of the offering of perfume, which for the Etruscans kept the corruption of the body away. From a similar sarcophagus a fragment of an arm has survived, the hand gripping an alabastron, a small flask for unguents.
If you go now, know that the sarcophagus sits between two building sites. The first is a restoration in stages, carried out in a laboratory the museum opens to the public on certain days. The second concerns the building: since 15 September 2026 rooms 11 to 14 have been closed while the floors are redone, and the Sarcophagus can be seen only from room 11, at a distance. Before you travel, ask the museum what is on view that day, because the two sites change from week to week.
2. The Apollo of Veii
Go up a little and the register changes. The Apollo of Veii is a terracotta statue 181 centimetres high, from the end of the 6th century BC. It was not made to stand in a room: it ran along the ridge of the roof of the Portonaccio temple at Veii, together with other life-size figures.
That is the thing to keep in your head while you look at it, because it explains all the rest. A statue meant for a roof is seen from below and against the light, so it has powerful legs, a cloak cut with deep grooves and a stride that thrusts forward. The wide smile, the same air as the Sarcophagus of the Spouses, is there to be read from eight metres away.
Look at it from a few steps back, if the room lets you: that is the viewpoint it was made for. Tradition ties these sculptures to the name of Vulca, the only Etruscan artist whose name an ancient source has handed down to us. It remains a hypothesis, built on one line of Pliny: if you hear a guide give it as certain, know that the certainty is not there.
The statues, found in 1916 by Giulio Quirino Giglioli, made up a single scene. Hercules has just caught the hind with the golden horns, sacred to Artemis, and Apollo strides forward to face him: the statue of Hercules is displayed in the room opposite him, while in Apollo’s own room there is the head of Mercury, who in the scene acted as peacemaker. It was a story, not a row of statues, and that is why the Apollo walks. The Apollo is in room 40, which is open; room 39, with other terracottas from the same sanctuary, has been closed for rehanging since 13 January 2026.
3. The Pyrgi gold tablets
The tablets are three sheets of very thin inscribed gold, brought to light on 8 July 1964 in the excavation of the sanctuary of Pyrgi, the port of Cerveteri. The museum shows them on the ground floor, in room 13a devoted to that sanctuary, together with the bronze nails with gold-covered heads that fixed them to the jamb of a temple door. That room, though, is closed for works: if you are coming for the tablets, check first that it has reopened.
Stop here, because this is the piece that answers the question at the top. Two tablets are written in Etruscan and one in Phoenician, and they say roughly the same thing: the king of Cerveteri, Thefarie Velianas, dedicates a sacred place to the goddess Uni, whom the Phoenicians called Astarte. A text that exists in two languages, one of which we can read, is the closest thing to a dictionary that Etruscan studies possess.
The bilingual did not solve the Etruscan language, and that is worth saying: the two versions do not match word for word, and the vocabulary you can draw from them is small. But it fixed a historical anchor and a date around 500 BC, and it showed that Cerveteri was doing business with Carthage. Look carefully for them in the case: they are three small sheets, and without the label you would walk straight past.
4. The Chigi Olpe
A ceramic jug 26 centimetres high, made in Corinth around 640 BC and found in 1881 in a tomb at Monte Aguzzo, near Veii, on an estate of prince Mario Chigi: that is where its name comes from. It is not Etruscan, it arrived here as merchandise, and that is exactly why it matters.
Get close, because the painting is tiny and is lost from a metre away. There are three friezes and they tell different things. At the top, in five centimetres of height, two lines of hoplites advance towards each other with blazoned shields, while on the left a group is still arming and an aulos player, on the double pipe, sets the pace. In the central frieze, the widest, a procession of chariots and horsemen runs, along with a lion hunt and, under the handle, the judgement of Paris. At the bottom there is a hare hunt among the bushes.
This vase carries two firsts. The upper frieze is the oldest known depiction of a hoplite phalanx in action, the compact formation that would decide Greek warfare for three centuries; and the judgement of Paris, with the names of the characters written beside them in large letters, is the first time that scene appears in Greek painting. The vase ended up in a tomb north of Rome because the Etruscan aristocracy bought Greek vases and had themselves buried with them.
The Olpe is displayed in room 38, which the museum has closed for rehanging along with room 39: before you come for it, check that it has reopened.
5. The Ficoroni Cista
Go up to the upper floor and walk into the rooms of the old collections. There is a cylindrical bronze container seventy-four centimetres high, its lid topped by three small figures and its feet shaped as lion paws. It was a toilet case, and it comes from Palestrina, ancient Praeneste, from the 4th century BC.
On the body, engraved with a fine point, an episode from the saga of the Argonauts unfolds: the boxing match between Pollux and the king of the Bebryces, with the ship and the crew around them. On the lid a small inscription in archaic Latin says that Novios Plautios made it in Rome and that Dindia Macolnia gave it to her daughter.
Read it, because it is a rare sentence. An object found at Palestrina, decorated with a Greek story, signed by a craftsman with an Oscan name, made in Rome and given by a mother: four worlds in one line of bronze, and the sign that in this part of Italy no culture lived shut up at home.
6. The Castellani gold
The Castellani collection came to the state in 1919, given by the last heir of the Roman family of goldsmiths, and it is the room that most confuses the people who look at it, because it puts two things side by side. On one hand there are ancient jewels and precious objects the Castellani collected; on the other the «modern gold», the jewellery their workshop produced in the nineteenth century taking its cue from the excavations, almost always signed on the back with two interlaced Cs.
The challenge the family worked on for decades was granulation, the technique with which ancient goldsmiths soldered thousands of tiny gold spheres onto a surface without the solder showing. Fortunato Pio Castellani, who founded the workshop, claimed to have recovered the secret among the craftsmen of Sant’Angelo in Vado, in the Marche, who still used it for folk jewellery; in 1859 the family spent five months restoring and cataloguing the Campana collection, and from there arrived at an acceptable reproduction.
The reason to walk into this room is precisely the comparison between an ancient piece and one from the workshop. The Castellani did not simply copy: they reworked the models and added motifs the Etruscans never knew, such as ancient coins and micromosaics, and looking at the two series next to each other you understand what it means to reread a jewel instead of remaking it.
Warning: the Castellani gold room has been closed for rehanging since 11 August 2026, and even when it reopens it cannot be visited on free-admission days.
7. The François Tomb, which arrived in 2026
This is the new thing that makes today’s museum different from the one of two years ago. The François Tomb was discovered on 1 May 1857 at Vulci, on land belonging to prince Torlonia, and its paintings, detached from the walls shortly afterwards, stayed for more than a century in a private collection, visible to almost nobody.
Why did a cycle of Etruscan paintings of this importance stay invisible for more than a century?
Because it belonged to a private owner, and no law obliged him to show it. In May 2026 the frescoes entered the state’s holdings and passed to the collections of Villa Giulia, which presents them reassembled as they must have looked inside the tomb. It is a cycle from the second half of the 4th century BC, and what makes it unique is not the quality, high though it is: it is the subject. On one side run Greek episodes, such as the sacrifice of the Trojan prisoners at the funeral of Patroclus and the duel between Eteocles and Polynices, and beside them appears the portrait of Vel Saties, the nobleman who had the tomb built. On the other there is a battle between Etruscan heroes, each with his name written next to him: Macstarna unties the bonds of Caile Vipinas, the Caelius Vibenna of the Latin sources, while their companions fall on the enemy, and one of those enemies is called Cneve Tarchunies Rumach, Gnaeus Tarquinius of Rome.
The museum identifies Macstarna with the future king of Rome Servius Tullius. The Roman chronicles know this story and tell it their own way: here is the Etruscan version, used by a family from Vulci to tell its own story.
The visit is included in the ticket, but it has to be booked: you go in in groups of no more than thirty, with departures every twenty minutes, and on free-admission days the tomb is not visited. Until 31 December 2026 the route closes with the exhibition Il Ritorno degli Eroi, with objects and documents lent by the Louvre, the British Museum, the museums of Brussels and Lausanne, the Vatican Museums and the German Archaeological Institute in Rome.
8. The nymphaeum, which is not an Etruscan work
The eighth thing to see is the villa. Step out into the semicircular courtyard, cross the loggia and lean over: the ground drops away on three levels, and at the bottom, below the level of the garden, there is a basin surrounded by caryatids, fed by the Acqua Vergine, the same Roman aqueduct that reaches the Trevi Fountain.
It is called a nymphaeum. Ammannati designed it, and it is one of the most imitated inventions of sixteenth-century Rome. To feed it Julius III had a branch of the aqueduct diverted all the way here, and the water was not there to make a spectacle of anything: it cooled the air of a sunken space, where the pope ate in summer.
Go all the way down. From the lowest level, looking up, you grasp the trick of the whole thing: each floor hides the one below it, and the villa looks small until you are inside it.
Practical information
Details checked on 17 September 2026 on the museum’s official website, museoetru.it. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. Full price is 13 euros and covers the whole permanent route. The reduced ticket costs 2 euros and is for European Union citizens between 18 and 25. The visit to the François Tomb and to the exhibition that goes with it is included in the ticket, but booking is compulsory: you book on the CoopCulture website, or at the ticket office if places are left. The audio guide costs 7 euros. Opening hours. Tuesday to Sunday 8:30-19:30, with the rooms closing at 19:00 and last admission at 18:30. The museum stays closed on Mondays, on 25 December and on 1 January. Free admission. Entry is free on the first Sunday of the month, on 25 April, 2 June and 4 November. On those days, though, the Macchina del Tempio, the Castellani gold room and the Sala dello Zodiaco are off limits, and the François Tomb is not visited. Closed rooms. The museum is being rehung. On the day of the check, rooms 11 to 14 were closed, from 15 September 2026, with the Sarcophagus of the Spouses visible only from room 11 and the Pyrgi tablets not visible; room 27 of the Castellani gold, from 11 August 2026; rooms 24 and 25, from 22 August; and rooms 38 and 39 of Veii, with the Chigi Olpe. The upper floor is reached by the outside staircase in the left-hand side garden. The notices change often: read them on the museum website the day before, or call 06 3226571. Getting there. The museum is at piazzale di Villa Giulia 9. The nearest metro A stop is Flaminio, about a kilometre away. Tram 19 has a stop named after the museum and tram 3 stops at Flaminia/Belle Arti, a few hundred metres away. From the National Gallery of Modern Art you walk here in a quarter of an hour along viale delle Belle Arti. How long to allow. The eight works in this guide need two hours, which with the rooms closed at the moment come down to an hour and a half. Add another hour if you also want to follow the rooms of Vulci and the Kircherian collections, and half an hour for the garden.
Where to go from here
A quarter of an hour away on foot, in the same district, is the other great state collection of Valle Giulia: the works to see are in National Gallery of Modern Art: 8 artworks to see, from Canova to Pollock.
If ancient sculpture interests you and not only the Etruscan kind, the natural route continues at Palazzo Altemps and Palazzo Massimo, the two branches of the National Roman Museum that tell the story of Rome once the Etruscans were gone. The full map of the city’s collections is in Museums in Rome: the 8 you should not miss.
Photo credits: Sarcophagus of the Spouses, Apollo of Veii and Pyrgi tablets by Sailko (CC BY-SA 4.0); Chigi Olpe by ArchaiOptix (CC BY-SA 4.0); nymphaeum by Andrea Comisi (CC BY-SA 4.0), all from Wikimedia Commons. The François Tomb fresco is in the public domain.
