The ‘modern’ town is medieval and picturesque, draped over a spur of the soft, easily carved volcanic rock called tufa, within earshot of the motorway. Relics of a once-great Etruscan centre of commerce are displayed in the Cerite Museum, inside Ruspoli Palace neat Piuazza Santa Maria.  

The Etruscan urban plan was a city for the living and a city, equally important, for the dead, usually on adjacent hills. The Caere necropolis is 2 km north of Cerveteri (open daily except Mon). Ticket office and a snack bar are in the entrance square. You walk among long rows of tombs which have been denuded of most of their furnishings and paintings but cleaned up and made presentable. Not all the tumuli (earth-covered rock mounds above tombs) survive but those which do are wonderfully evocative of a distant past. Greek vases are placed here and there but the real treasures of old Caere have been distributed among the local Cerite Museum, the Gregorian at the Vatican, the Villa Giulia in Rome and, sad to say, many world museums and private collectors. The pillaging of this city as soon as it was unearthed was a bonanza for the illicit art markets.

A peasant farmer, ploughing the hill-side in 1834, saw his oxen suddenly disappear down a hole. Thus the most famous of Etruscan tombs came to light. It is known as the Regolini Galassi and can be visited at Sorbo, south of Cerveteri village, about 4 km from the main Caere complex. The tomb is architecturally interesting but the sumptuous treasure which surrounded the princely corpse in its central chamber − gold, ivory, bronzes, ceramic jars − is now in the Gregorian Museum. 

Walk among Caere’s tombs on sandy tracks between low cliffs and tumuli, as the ancient Etruscans did in this city of their dead. You can even drive down Main Street, which is Via Sepolcrale Principale. To enter the central or Banditaccia system of tombs, which is like a collection of gigantic turf-topped beehives, you need a guide. Tomb of the Marine Waves, the Five Chairs, the Tarquins-tumuli of the Shields, the Painted Animals, the Boat − stripped of their glory, they hardly live up to their picturesque names.