In Vulci and Volterra, museums offer informative displays on Etruscan history. In the frescoes of Tarquinia, pipers play on as red-skinned dancers perform to the delight of thousands of tourists per year. And copies of Etruscan Places are for sale everywhere. The mystery Lawrence relished may best be found off the tourist track-in the rock tombs carved along the ravines at Cerveteri and neighboring areas. Covered with ivy, the huge tombs carved in cliffs face out upon a ravine. Wandering through the tall weeds, I approached a tumulus where a tall doorway led into a chamber hollowed in the rock.
There at the back stood the fake door, which Lawrence called the door of the soul, as it had no real opening and was only painted or carved on the wall surface. I think of Lawrence sitting in a chamber like this one, contemplating the door of the soul-a barrier for the body, but not for the imagination. For the Etruscans, he believed, death was a continuing celebration of life, or so he learned from studying their tomb art. The heroine, Harriet Sackett, a feminist photographer, comes to the Tuscia to photograph Etruscan tombs and finds herself entangled with count Federigo del Re, occultist and self-proclaimed Etruscan spirit.
While working on my novel, I lived in a farmhouse outside the gates of the old town, with a window overlooking a gorge where dozens of tombs have been hollowed out of the rock face. You cannot live in a such a place for long without unconsciously absorbing its mystique. In the course of my research, I met dowsers and healers who trace their occult powers back to the Etruscans.
I met a controversial scholar who has dedicated a lifetime to studying step pyramids and altars in the woods north of Rome that remain unexplained by the academe.
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I met a chef who cooked me dishes he believed were surely of Etruscan origin and the author of a cookbook whose grandmother ran the trattoria where Lawrence liked to dine. I met a woman who leads tours to a secret place where witches gathered in the middle ages. A countess unveiled for me her secret collection of Etruscan artefacts illegally assembled by her grandfather. I find myself fascinated by this culture.. It takes a lot to draw me in. I need to encounter the whole spectrum of emotion as well as the archaeological vestiges. Egypt, of course, does this to me and produces the emotion and the joy..
But something about the Etruscan culture calls out to me.. I need to know more! Reading about your own experiences in and around the places the book explores, explains the tantalising atmosphere and profundity you achieved. Like Liked by 1 person. Val, thanks for your kind words. Without you and Roger, this book would never have seen print. By examining the beautiful and intricate frescoes, carvings and paintings, even though mostly vanished, Lawrence was able to use his intuition and imagination to visualise and understand the Etruscan way of life he so admired.
In six remarkable essays, Lawrence delves into the very essence of Etruscian life by piecing together various remnants including archaic lettering of a lost language 'slanting with the real Etruscan carelessness and fullness of life'; low relief carvings 'so easy and friendly, as natural as breathing'; faded Etruscan paintings with 'the quiet flow of touch that unites the man and the woman on the couch'; the tight angle of the roof where a pigeon, 'the bird of the soul coos out of the unseen'; and symbols such as the Arc on the women's tombs 'where lies the mystery of eternal life' and phallic stones on the men's tombs with paintings of banqueting scenes 'as natural as life'.
One can only wonder how Lawrence could paint such a glorious picture of this lost race of people with such little physical evidence, as he says: They were like children but they had the force, the power and the sensual knowledge of true adults. This book was boring and forever taking and I hated it.
Etruscan Places
Feb 04, Mary rated it it was ok Shelves: Good, but not fiction. A visit to Etruscan sites in Italy in the s. I was interested in a travel narrative on the Etruscans, as I've hoped to use some time abroad to learn more about them, but what I got instead was a whiny "hipster-before-the-hipsters" tour of various sites in Italy. You will find in these pages more complaints about modernity and soliloquies boosting the author's particular view of the Etruscans supposed shortcomings "they weren't overindulgent!
They just learned how to live the good life! A few interesting tidbits here and there, but not much. Mar 11, Linda rated it it was amazing Shelves: Gravely ill with tuberculosis, unaware of how little time he had left he died three years later at the age of 44 , Lawrence sought an ideal land where he might flourish as a "whole man alive" and find an antidote for the alienation of industrialized society.
Lawrence's last pilgrimage led him to the Etruscan ruins north of Rome.
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His idea was to wri D. His idea was to write a travel book about the twelve great cities of Etruscan civilization. The Etruscans were a sophisticated people who settled in the Italian peninsula between and B. Lawrence rejected the contemporary, scholarly views of the time: Lawrence's approach to the Etruscans was highly personal and unscientific, yet his book, Etruscan Places, has shaped modern readers' ideas of this vanished people more than any other text. Traveling on foot and by mule cart, Lawrence explored Tuscia-a wild, wooded area between Rome and Tuscany, where the center of Etruscan culture was located.
He visited the frescoed tombs of Tarquinia and the rougher rock tombs of Cerveteri, as well as the sites of Vulci and Volterra. In the Etruscans, Lawrence found a life-affirming culture which exalted the body and which saw death as a journey towards renewal. The art decorating their tombs, eloquently described in Etruscan Places, bears witness to their faith in an unending joy.
The tombs Lawrence admired are easy to visit today, well-connected to Rome and Florence by a system of trains and buses. In Vulci and Volterra, museums offer informative displays on Etruscan history. In the frescoes of Tarquinia, pipers play on as red-skinned dancers perform to the delight of thousands of tourists per year. And copies of Etruscan Places are for sale everywhere. The mystery Lawrence relished may best be found off the tourist track-in the rock tombs carved along the ravines at Cerveteri and neighboring areas.
To get a sense of what these sites were like in Lawrence's time, while doing research for my novel.
Etruscan Places by D.H. Lawrence
The Etruscan set in Lawrence's era, I recently visited one of the lesser known areas-out in the countryside, off the main road. Covered with ivy, the huge tombs carved in cliffs face out upon a ravine.
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Wandering through the tall weeds, I approached a tumulus where a tall doorway led into a chamber hollowed in the rock. There at the back stood the fake door, which Lawrence called the door of the soul, as it had no real opening and was only painted or carved on the wall surface. I think of Lawrence sitting in a chamber like this one, contemplating the door of the soul-a barrier for the body, but not for the imagination.
More than a travel book, his Etruscan Places is a spiritual testament celebrating the power of the imagination to carry us into other dimensions in search of the source of life. Sep 09, Alex rated it liked it. What struck me most about DH Lawrence's travelogue through Italy? The seemingly casual interactions with fascism. The leisurely, unhurried pace to avoid saying "slow" of life in these small towns which were once Etruscan strongholds. That nomadic spirit that allows two companions to travel across a foreign land, truly exploring, asking locals for services and obtaining it.
The simpler times such images evoke now. But most certainly not the Etruscans themselves.
Indeed, just as history has provided us very little information about their civilization, in this text they stay distant, even as Lawrence praises their assumed virtues. The tombs become a cavalcade of itemized art descriptions, a succession of rising and descending. While Lawrence is willing to make much of what these people may have been, we still have no better understanding. Perhaps this is the purpose, though.
The description of the art's simplicity and complexity makes me want to do nothing more than see it. The vision of the networks of tombs make me want to go there. I should be in Italy myself this coming spring By piquing the interest, the reader wants to know more, which is always the first step. With more people searching, we can potentially learn more about these vanquished people. Lawrence suggests, through his discomfort of museums as well as his excitement over these off the beaten path sites, that we should do it firsthand.
It is a very readable and enjoyable book about a week spent visiting Etruscan relics in the mids. I hadn't read any Lawrence since the Beatles were performing and so I didn't realize what a fine writer he was. His descriptions of the landscapes and the tombs are so very clear and accurate.
Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays
The narrative of the trip flows along naturally, one event leading easily to the next. I also owe him for a couple of specifics. He coined the phrase "temporarily important persons" to describe politicians. He also cleared up a question I had about classical imagery. In Fiesole, in the ruins of the old Roman amphitheatre, you see images of what are clearly angels - humans with wings on their backs. I wondered about the origin of these creatures that I had always thought of as Christian. According to Lawrence, they go back to the Etruscans.
Since Fiesole was originally an Etruscan city, it makes sense to me now. At the same time, his judgments are questionable. It was interesting to read Lawrence's impressions of Italy in the s - to be honest I enjoyed these more than his conjecture about the Etruscans and their world - a world that is still open to much debate almost years later.
Some of the passages made for uncomfortable reading, due to Lawrence's apparent feelings of superiority over the local people, but having read other travelogues of the time these sorts of observations weren't uncommon.
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I'd be interested to know what sort of state thes It was interesting to read Lawrence's impressions of Italy in the s - to be honest I enjoyed these more than his conjecture about the Etruscans and their world - a world that is still open to much debate almost years later. I'd be interested to know what sort of state these tombs are in now, and whether they are open to the public, or considered too precious to have a stream of people tramping through.
I'd like to see some digital photos of the paintings anyway. As for the many figurines and funerary urns, I can attest to having seen masses of them in various Italian museums over the years. Excellent gentle introduction to the history of the Etruscans as a travel book. Lawrence had just returned from Mexico and here visits some of the main Etruscan sites in western Tuscany and Lazio. I bought by chance battered Penguin edition just before my trip to Tuscany and made Volterra a particular destination as a result. It has a great museum with the most fantastic ancient statue I've ever seen - so modern in appearance , anyway I digress.
Lawrence has a chatty style.