From the ridiculous to the sublime

I went out in search of The Etruscans today - they sound like an Indie Band to me. They were hanging out up at the top of the hill in Fiesole. They seem to have hung out there from around 500BC til they were beaten by the Romans some time in the first century AD.

The archaeology museum had a few nice artefacts - small votive bronzes that to my eye were influenced by Archaic and Cycladic Greek sculpture - the Greeks colonized southern Italy in the 7th century BC (I got some of this out of a book but given some of the stuff I did into the Archaic Greek 'kourus' sculptures I could see it too. Honest.)

A lot of what we know of the Etruscans come from their burial practices - ash urns of considerable beauty - the British Museum has a collection to die for. And those massive tombs. It seems the ones in Fiesole were used to store rows of ash pots of the wealthy and they were then taken over by the Romans.

There is also a fascinating section in the museum - after you have passed through an underground room with water actually running through it - devoted to the Lombards who arrived after a massive journey down from Scandinavia via the Germanic states to eventually take over from the failing Roman Empire only to be repulsed eventually by the Franks. They had a necropolis in the site of the old Etruscan temple, which had in turn been adopted by the Romans.

There is a pretty neat Roman amphitheatre, not so unlike the Fascist era football stadium down in Florence.

As I was wandering back to the flat I stopped in the Cathedral of St Romulus - martyred in Fiesole in AD 90. There is a beautiful chapel altarpiece by Mino da Fiesole which is today's feature.

After yesterday's sculpture this is a different thing altogether. It was catching the late afternoon light coming in the small high windows.