Museum visits · Montalto di Castro · Italy
The archaeological and nature park of Vulci
an Etruscan city turned back into open country, with a Devil's bridge and a castle over the gorge
Vulci was one of the great Etruscan cities, and today it is a meadow. There is no village on top of it, there is no modern road cutting through it: there is the decumanus you walk along through the grass, with the forum on one side and the great temple on the other, and the Maremma countryside all round. It is the opposite of Cerveteri, where the city of the dead survived and the city of the living did not: here you walk in the city of the living. The Fiora goes round it cutting a gorge, and over the gorge stands the Abbadia bridge, which everyone calls the Devil's bridge: Etruscan footings, a Roman arch of the third century BC, thirty metres above the water. Above the bridge there is a medieval castle, and inside the castle the national museum. The park is archaeological and natural at once, and the two things cannot be separated: the landscape is part of what you come to see.
Getting there
The park is inside the commune of Montalto di Castro but on the opposite side from the sea: you go up inland, towards Canino.
- From Montalto to the park is 13 kilometres and about twenty minutes: the Aurelia and then the Fiora and the Abbadia provincial roads, going up towards Canino. As the crow flies it is eight and a half, but the road winds
- The park car park is free and the maps give it as suitable for motorhomes: it is the same stopping place listed in the Montalto card, with the warning that no source says you may sleep there
Practical information
Duration the shortest route is 2.3 kilometres, but the sources give it two and a half hours: it is not a walk, it is a visit with twenty stops. With the museum in the castle you get to a full half day.
Price 8 euros, 5 reduced
When to go all year, better in the morning
Suitable for everyone, and it is ground for closed shoes rather than sandals: dirt track, grass and a few ups and downs. There is no shade on the archaeological route, so in summer and in early September you go in the morning.
Booking not needed, the ticket is bought at the park ticket office.
Contacts
Where it is
Montalto di Castro · Lazio
Notes
- Hours and prices from the official website: in September 9:00-18:00; full 8 euros, reduced 5 for school parties, young people, over 65s, groups and families. The park closes only on 25 December and 1 January, and closes early on the 24th and the 31st
- A third-party source gives the ticket as 10 euros: it is the official website that says 8, and that is the one that counts
- The François tomb is the story that makes the journey worth it, and in 2026 it changed its ending. Alessandro François discovered it in 1857, and its walls were painted with Vel Saties, the Greek myths and the revenge of the Vibenna brothers. In 1863 Prince Torlonia had them detached from the walls, cut into panels and taken to Villa Albani, in Rome, inside a private collection that could not be visited: for a hundred and sixty years those paintings were the masterpiece nobody could see. At the end of May 2026 the State bought them from the Torlonia, Sforza Cesarini and Gaetani heirs, and since 1 July 2026 they have been on public display at the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia, in Rome, with a video that reconstructs the whole tomb. Until the end of December 2026 they are accompanied by the exhibition "Il Ritorno degli Eroi", which puts the scattered grave goods back together with loans from the Louvre, the British Museum, Brussels and Lausanne
- In the tomb, inside the park, fragments are what remain: it is as well to know before you go down, because anyone expecting the paintings they have seen in books will not find them here. A full-size reconstruction is at the museum of archaeological research at Canino, and the originals are now in Rome
- This trip lines them up without meaning to: Vulci is where the tomb is, Villa Giulia in Rome is where its paintings ended up, and it is the same museum that holds the gold tablets of Pyrgi. Anyone doing all the stops sees the hole and what was taken out of it
- There are three marked routes, and you choose at the entrance: the short one 2.3 kilometres, the complete one 3.5, the nature one 1.5. The last of these goes down to the little lake of the Pellicone, where the Fiora widens out below the tufa walls: it is the part that justifies the word "nature" in the park's name, and anyone who comes only for the stones misses it
- The national archaeological museum is in the Abbadia castle, above the bridge
Photo: giovanni bidi, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0
Photo: mararie, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
Photo: giovanni bidi, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0
