Museum visits · Cerveteri · Italy
The Banditaccia necropolis at Cerveteri
a city of the dead built like a city of the living, with its streets and its houses
The Banditaccia does not look like a cemetery: it looks like a village. The Etruscans of Caere cut real streets into the tufa, with pavements and gutters for the water, and along the sides they set the tumuli, domes of earth on a drum of cut rock. Inside, the chambers repeat the rooms of a house: the beds cut into the rock, the chairs, the pillars, the pitched roof with its false beams. You walk about in it as in a neighbourhood, and the sensation is of crossing an inhabited place rather than a necropolis. It has been a UNESCO site since 2004, together with Tarquinia, and the two of them are the pair with which Italy put the Etruscans on the list.
Getting there
Two different stops in the same day: the necropolis is outside the town, the museum inside it.
- From Santa Severa you go back up the Aurelia and turn inland: it is under twenty minutes
- The necropolis is a couple of kilometres north of the centre of Cerveteri, and there is a free car park at the entrance
- The Cerite national museum, on the other hand, is in the town, inside the Ruspoli castle, at 41.998669, 12.099418: it is a second stop and not a walk from the necropolis
- The car park takes a long vehicle without trouble, and that is the thing to know before you set off: here you do not leave the motorhome in the town and walk up, you drive right to the door
- The road has nothing narrow about it: from the car park on via Cartagine at Santa Severa it is 14 kilometres and about 17 minutes, the Aurelia and then via di Zambra and via della Necropoli, on the flat
Practical information
Duration two or three hours to go round the necropolis without hurrying; the museum in the town is another good hour, and together they make the half day.
Price 13 euros for the site ticket, museum and necropolis, 2 reduced
When to go all year, closed on Mondays
Suitable for everyone. The route is on beaten earth and barely rises and falls, but you go into the chambers stooping and it is dark inside: a torch in your pocket changes the visit.
Booking not needed, the ticket is bought at the site ticket office.
Contacts
Where it is
Cerveteri · Lazio
You set off from
Notes
- Hours and prices as declared by the PACT, the archaeological park that holds Cerveteri and Tarquinia together: closed on Mondays; from 29 March to 12 October 2026 the necropolis opens 9:00-19:30 with last entry at 18:30, and the museum keeps those hours all year
- The site ticket costs 13 euros and puts together the museum and the necropolis of the same place, valid 30 days. The circuit of all four sites (the two necropolises and the two museums of Cerveteri and Tarquinia) costs 21 euros and is valid four months. Under 18s go in free, between 18 and 25 with European citizenship you pay 2 euros
- The circuit is worth it on this trip, which takes in Cerveteri on the 10th and Tarquinia on the 11th: two site tickets come to 26 euros, the circuit comes to 21 and includes twice as much
- The Tomb of the Reliefs can be seen, and it is the one the ticket is worth paying for: a single chamber with the beds cut into the tufa and, on the pillars and the walls, the household tools modelled in stucco and painted. Helmets, shields, knives, jugs, a coiled rope, and down at the bottom Cerberus with his three heads. This one is lit, and you see what there is to see; the torch is for the other chambers, where there is no light
- The sepulchral ways are real streets, and this is the thing the photographs in books do not get across: you walk down the middle of them with the tumuli rising to right and left higher than a person, and at the end the way carries on. The surface is beaten earth, and in summer the grass is dry and everything burns with light: a day of full sun is fine to look at and hard work to walk
- Most of what came out of here is not here: it is at Villa Giulia, in Rome, like the gold tablets of Pyrgi. The Cerite museum, in the Ruspoli castle, keeps a part of it
