Etruscan Heritage: Tarquinia & Tuscania

The tarquinia tour from civitavecchia takes you north along the Tyrrhenian coast into a landscape that predates Rome by centuries. Forty kilometres up the Via Aurelia, the city of Tarquinia rises on a tufa plateau above the surrounding plain — a plateau that the Etruscans chose for their capital twelve hundred years before Rome became an empire. The necropolis lies on the adjacent hill, and what it contains changes how you think about this part of the world. Not ruins, not artefacts, but paintings: banquets, musicians, dancers, wrestlers and fishermen, rendered in vivid mineral pigments on the walls of underground chambers cut from the tufa between the seventh and second centuries BC.

The etruscan shore excursion civitavecchia itinerary continues inland to Tuscania, fifteen minutes south of Tarquinia, where two Romanesque churches from the eleventh and twelfth centuries stand on the edge of a tufa plateau above olive groves and ravines. San Pietro and Santa Maria Maggiore are among the finest examples of Romanesque architecture in central Italy, and they sit facing open countryside with a quality of solitude that no photograph adequately prepares you for. Tuscania itself is small, genuine and unhurried — the antithesis of a tourist destination, which is exactly what makes it one.

Painted tombs, medieval churches, no crowds

• Tarquinia necropolis — UNESCO World Heritage

  The painted tombs of Tarquinia are among the most important Etruscan sites in the world, inscribed by UNESCO alongside the necropolis of Cerveteri. Access is through a small number of tombs opened on rotation — your driver times the visit to catch the best-preserved chambers.

• The Etruscan museum in the medieval town

  The Museo Nazionale Tarquiniese, housed in a Gothic palace in the centre of Tarquinia, contains the famous pair of winged terracotta horses that stood above the altar of an Etruscan temple in the fourth century BC. One of the great museums of ancient art, almost entirely unknown to non-specialist visitors.

• Tuscania — the hill town nobody tells you about

  No queues, no souvenir stands, no admission tickets. Two extraordinary Romanesque churches on a promontory above the countryside, and a medieval town that has been making its own pace since the twelfth century. Many of our guests call it the best hour of their cruise.