John NOBLE-WILFORD, Lost No More: An Etruscan Rebirth.

[New York Times, april 27-28, 2003].

 The Romans relished their founding myths. Aeneas, a fugitive from fallen Troy, anchored in the 
mouth of the Tiber River and there in the hills of Latium rekindled the flame of Trojan greatness. 

Romulus and Remus, twin sons of Mars and a sleeping beauty, were suckled by a she-wolf and grew up 
to establish the city destined for grandeur.

In reality, though, the Romans owed more than they ever admitted to their accomplished predecessors 
and former enemies on the Italian peninsula, the Etruscans. 

They were known as Rasenna, and Tusci or Etrusci by Romans, whose historians generally ignored or 
belittled them.

It bas been left to the archaeologists and art historians of today to part some of the veils of time 
obscuring Etruscan culture and restore these enigmatic people to their proper place in pre-Roman history.

The Etruscans, who occupied much of north-central Italy in the first millennium B- C-, traded 
far and wide in the Mediterranean. 

Their prosperity and taste for luxury supported a long trading chain leading north to the Baltic Sea 
for prized amber.

The Etruscans were a conduit for the introduction of Greek culture and its pantheon of gods 
to the Romans. 

They developed a version of the Greek alphabet, a step that influenced Roman letters and thereby northern 
Europe's. 

They built the first cities in Italy, and their influence shows up in later Roman works of architecture and 
engineering.

If the Etruscans were once considered a "lost" society, scholars said at a recent symposium here at the 
University of Pennsylvania, they are now being found in new excavations and a closer examination of the 
wealth of artifacts that have been uncovered over the last century.

Tbe symposium, "The Etruscans Revealed: New Perspectives on Pre-Roman Italy," 
was held in conjunction with the opening of a new gallery of Etruscan antiquities at the 
university's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Dr- P- Gregory Warden, an Etruscan archaeologist at Southern Methodist University, 
said the significant change was a movement away from almost total reliance on evidence from 
tombs to systematic excavations of where the people lived.

The ruins of settlements and cities, Dr- Warden said, are revealing the "social landscape" 
from huts to houses to palaces. 

At places in and around Florence, Bologna, Perugia and Pisa, excavators are uncovering remains of 
fortification walls, artisans' workshops and kilns, temples and grids of streets.

Dr- Stephan Steingräber of the German Archaeological Institute of Rome described evidence of 
considerable urban planning.

This research, conducted by several international teams, is only just beginning, Dr- Steingräber said, 
but it has become clear that Etruscan settlements began evolving from collections of thatched huts to 
tile-roof rectangular houses on stone foundations and then to real cities as early as the seventh century 
B- C-.

Dr- Annette Rathje of the University of Copenhagen said that excavations at a site called 
Murlo, on a hill south of Siena, were turning up increasing evidence of large-scale settlement 
and monumental art. No one knows when the Etruscans came to Italy or where they came from.

But even after they were subjugated and then annexed by the Roman Republic in the first 
century B- C-, the Etruscans and their influence never entirely disappeared. 

They were assimilated. They lost their language to Latin, and yet their legacy 
has endured in surprising ways.

truscan achievements in engineering lie behind Roman aqueducts and basilicas. 

The tombs of the emperors Augustus and Hadrian deliberately imitated Etruscan ones 
from seven centuries before. 

Tbe artists of the Renaissance also built upon Etruscan foundations. 

Painting frescoes on wet plaster had been an Etruscan talent.

Even more recently, Etruscan influence surfaced in disturbing form. 

One of their symbols of ruling power, a bundle of rods known as the "fasces", had 
been adopted by Romans and was then unforgettably revived by Mussolini and the Fascists 
of modern history.