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When the Mediterranean sailors of ancient Greece and Egypt looked west toward Italy, they stared into a great unknown. It was 800 years before the birth of Christ and Rome still didn't exist but stories were told of mysterious peoples with strange, exotic customs and untold riches. The tales were irresistible.
Setting off from the great civilized cities of the East, like Athens and Tyre, adventurous Greek traders sailed west into uncharted seas.
Navigating by the stars without instruments, they began to explore a remote and little known peninsula of the Western Mediterranean. They called it Hesperia, the land of the evening sun.
On the 8th century BC, time of westward expansion, Phoenicians going west, Greeks going west founding colonies, when the Greeks sailed into Italy, they found something they didn't expect, an advanced civilization already there.
Here in the hills of Tuscany, there were already walled cities. There were kings and high priests. There were skillful craftsmen who created a tender and sensuous art like no other in the Mediterranean. And there were traders ready to barter the finest gold and iron work the ancient world had ever seen.
Before Rome, there were the Etruscans. They taught the Romans everything but left no written records.
Incredible. The Etruscans were some of the most amazing artisans that the West has ever seen. They worked in metal for sculpture. They worked in terracotta and life-size statues with these amazing, inviting expressions, very warm, they are not cold and distant. But they are ... they are people that you want to meet.
The Etruscans lived in the fertile hills of Tuscany, but their real wealth lay underground. The richest deposits of iron ore, copper and tin in the central Mediterranean.
As early as 700 BC, they created shafts, tunnels, subterranean galleries. Smelters and slag-heap so vast that 2. 5 thousand years later, Mussolini reprocessed them to produce weapons for World War II. The Etruscans traded their metal work as far afield as Syria, Portugal and even Sweden.
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