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A Short History of the Etruscans
Of all civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean, it is perhaps the Etruscans who hold the greatest allure. This is fundamentally because, unlike their Greek and Latin neighbours, the Etruscans left no textual sources to posterity. The only direct evidence for studying them and for understanding their culture is the archaeological, and to a much lesser extent, epigraphic record. The Etruscans must therefore be approached as if they were a prehistoric people; and the enormous wealth of Etruscan visual and material culture must speak for them. Yet they offer glimpses, in the record left by Greek and Roman authors, that they were literate and far from indeed, that their written histories were greatly admired by the Romans themselves.
Applying fresh archaeological discoveries and new insights, A Short History of the Etruscans engagingly conducts the reader through the birth, growth and demise of this fascinating and enigmatic ancient people, whose nemesis was the growing power of Rome. Exploring the 'discovery' of the Etruscans from the Renaissance onwards, Corinna Riva discusses the mysterious Etruscan language, which long remained wholly indecipherable; the Etruscan landscape; the 6th-century growth of Etruscan cities and Mediterranean trade. Close attention is also paid to religion and ritual; sanctuaries and monumental grave sites; and the fatal incorporation of Etruria into Rome's political orbit.
Applying fresh archaeological discoveries and new insights, A Short History of the Etruscans engagingly conducts the reader through the birth, growth and demise of this fascinating and enigmatic ancient people, whose nemesis was the growing power of Rome. Exploring the 'discovery' of the Etruscans from the Renaissance onwards, Corinna Riva discusses the mysterious Etruscan language, which long remained wholly indecipherable; the Etruscan landscape; the 6th-century growth of Etruscan cities and Mediterranean trade. Close attention is also paid to religion and ritual; sanctuaries and monumental grave sites; and the fatal incorporation of Etruria into Rome's political orbit.
- GenresHistory
256 pages, Paperback
First published December 10, 2020
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December 18, 2025
“A Short History of the Etruscans” is a book that refuses the easy seductions of its subject. It does not open by conjuring the Etruscans as an atmospheric riddle – a people glimpsed in painted tombs, glimpsed again in Roman anecdotes, then lost behind the veil of an only partially understood language. Corinna Riva begins elsewhere: with the long history of how others have looked at the Etruscans, spoken for them, recruited them, and, at times, invented them. This is not a decorative preface. It is the book’s central warning: the Etruscans have been mediated not only by the fragmentary nature of their sources, but by the ambitions and anxieties of those who have wanted them to signify something beyond themselves.
The Etruscans are frequently treated as a footnote to Greece and Rome – a bridge between the “real” classics and the Italic world that Rome would later consolidate. Riva’s opening chapter insists that this relegation has a history, and that the history is inseparable from politics. Medieval indifference, Renaissance appropriation, ducal pageantry, Enlightenment collecting, nationalist scholarship, and professional archaeology each produced an Etruria fit for its moment. The result is not a simple story of progress toward truth. It is a record of interpretive regimes, each one framing the Etruscans as origin, warning, proof, or ornament. By the time Riva turns to the ancient world itself, she has already trained the reader to recognize that reception is not a sidebar – it is part of the evidence.
That historiographical framing also clarifies an old dilemma. The Etruscans left an abundance of material remains and only a frustratingly thin written record in comparison with Greece and Rome. Most of what survives in ancient literature comes through Greek and Roman filters, and those filters can be moralizing, exoticizing, or politically instrumental. Riva does not pretend this can be corrected by a single interpretive trick. Instead, she treats the tension between archaeology and textual tradition as the basic condition of the field: the past is not simply recovered, it is reconstructed through methods that have their own histories, limits, and habits of distortion. Her approach is neither defensive nor romantic. It is practical, and in its practicality, quietly radical.
From that platform the book turns, as any short history must, to beginnings. Chapter 2 is careful about what a beginning can mean. The old obsession with Etruscan “origins” – whether they arrived from Anatolia, whether they were indigenous, whether they emerged through a decisive migration – is treated as a question archaeology cannot answer in the form it is usually posed. Riva replaces the origin story with a slower, more plausible narrative of emergence. Across the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age, settlements shift and aggregate; communities relocate to plateaus and defensible high ground; burial practices begin to display widening differences in status. What looks, in older accounts, like a sudden appearance becomes, in Riva’s account, a long set of choices that rearrange landscape and society.
What makes this chapter convincing is Riva’s refusal to treat material culture as a direct proxy for ethnicity. Pots and weapons have been made to carry too much interpretive weight in the past, enlisted as badges of identity rather than read as artifacts of practice. Riva instead treats grave goods, architectural choices, and settlement movement as social signals – evidence of competition, lineage claims, and emerging leadership. The reader is nudged away from the desire to name a people as if naming were the same as knowing, and toward the harder work of describing how authority forms, stabilizes, and reproduces itself. The Etruscans begin to appear not as an ethnic puzzle, but as a society becoming legible through patterns of hierarchy.
Chapter 3 moves into the seventh century BCE, a period in which urbanization accelerates. Riva’s prose adopts the rhythm of a careful report translated into lucid argument. Urbanization is not presented as a miracle of city founding or as an automatic step toward “civilization.” It is a reorganization of space and relationships. Sites that will later be named as Etruscan towns expand in scale and complexity; cemeteries become monumental; craft production and exchange intensify. The Mediterranean is also shifting, with new and thicker networks of interaction. But Riva refuses to treat interaction as a one-way force. Contact does not arrive like enlightenment from elsewhere. It enters systems that already have their own hierarchies and ambitions.
In this chapter, funerary landscapes do much of the argumentative work. Monumental tombs are not treated merely as art-history trophies, though Riva is never indifferent to their aesthetic force. They become political architecture: materializations of lineage, property, and memory. The “city,” in this view, is not only a dense settlement. It is a set of coordinated practices through which authority becomes visible and reproducible – through burial, through sanctuary building, through control of production, and through the ability to channel exchange into social advantage. Urbanization is, therefore, not simply about where people live. It is about how power is made to endure.
The book’s most decisive conceptual intervention arrives in Chapter 4, which addresses the archaic period and introduces the idea of the Etruscan non-polis. This is the moment when Riva’s historiographical caution becomes a direct challenge to classical common sense. For generations, Etruscan cities have been compared to the Greek polis and found wanting. Where is the civic equality? Where are the assemblies and institutions? Where is the political community imagined as a body of citizens rather than a hierarchy of households and patrons? Riva’s answer is that the comparison itself is the problem. The polis is not a universal measure. It is one historical form among others. Evaluating Etruscan urbanism by its absence is a way of making Etruria into a shadow of Greece.
The implications of this argument are larger than Etruscology. If the non-polis is accepted as viable, the ancient Mediterranean becomes less a stage on which Greece provides the model and everyone else approximates it, and more a field of diverse political experiments. Riva shows sanctuaries functioning as anchors of collective life, sites where ritual can bind people who are not equal into a shared symbolic order. She shows households operating as political units, and elites performing authority through monumentality, patronage, and the management of sacred space. Urban growth, in this account, does not require democracy. Complexity does not require civic equality. The Etruscans are not a failed version of something else. They are a successful version of themselves.
Chapter 4 is also where the lure of “Hellenization” receives its most sustained critique. Riva does not deny the presence of Greek objects, myths, and artistic forms. She denies the interpretive laziness that turns presence into surrender. Greek things circulate, but their meanings are remade. A myth painted on a wall or figured in terracotta is not a declaration of Greek identity; it is a resource, selected and refitted to local needs. Imported objects travel into local systems of display, ritual, and memory; they become instruments in elite competition and markers of participation in wider networks. What is borrowed is not simply copied. It is translated. Riva’s Etruscans are not passive recipients of culture, but active negotiators of it.
Chapter 5 performs a second recalibration by revisiting the fifth century BCE, a period often narrated as Etruscan decline. Riva treats the decline narrative as a symptom of selective attention. When scholarship equates cultural vitality with monumental display, any shift away from lavish tomb building can look like collapse. But the fifth century is not empty. It is redirected. Networks extend beyond Tyrrhenian Etruria; Etruscan presence strengthens in the Po Valley and along the Adriatic; and sites associated with mobility, trade, and planned settlement reveal a society capable of reconfiguration. The question becomes not “what was lost,” but “what changed,” and why.
The emphasis on mobility is not merely geographical. It is social. Movement reshapes identity, reconfigures elite strategies, and produces new urban forms, sometimes with more regular planning than earlier towns. Riva is careful to avoid turning orthogonal planning into a Greek fingerprint. Planning is a tool that can travel without importing an entire political system. What matters is how planning serves social aims: the organization of space, the control of production, the integration of diverse populations, the stabilization of authority in new environments. In this chapter, the Etruscans are shown responding to pressure and opportunity without the melodrama of decline: by shifting where they are strong, by reorganizing how they connect, and by adapting forms without surrendering agency.
The final chapter, “Etruria and Rome,” confronts the narrative that tends to swallow all Etruscan history. Roman literary sources, written with hindsight and national mythmaking, often frame Etruria as a conquered prelude to Rome’s greatness. Modern readers, raised on Rome as destiny, can too easily accept the framing. Riva insists on contingency. Rome’s expansion into Etruria from the fourth century BCE onward was real, and its violence cannot be softened by scholarly nuance, but it was also uneven, negotiated, and opportunistic. It exploited rivalries among city-states; it produced different outcomes for different communities; it created new paths for some elites even as it foreclosed options for others.
Archaeology complicates triumphalist stories. Urban life continues in many places; sanctuaries remain active; local practices persist within new political frameworks. Some Etruscan elites gain access to Roman structures and translate their authority into the language of the expanding power. Others lose local standing and see their options narrow. Meanwhile, Rome itself absorbs Etruscan elements – in ritual, in symbolism, in forms of representation that Roman authors later naturalize as Roman. The relationship is not simply a one-way drain. It is an entanglement, producing continuity and transformation at once.
If there is a throughline across the book, it is Riva’s insistence that the Etruscans have agency, and that agency is best seen not in famous names but in choices that materialize over time. Settlement movement becomes strategy; funerary display becomes political language; sanctuary building becomes infrastructure; exchange networks become arenas of competition and cohesion. Even the encounter with Rome becomes a field of decisions rather than a slide into inevitability. Riva’s compact format forces compression, but the compression is purposeful: it keeps the narrative from hardening into the familiar drama of rise and fall.
The epilogue turns outward, connecting these arguments to broader debates about connectivity and globalization. The word “globalization” can feel like an anachronistic provocation when applied to the ancient Mediterranean, yet Riva uses it less as a slogan than as a way of naming a pattern: networks that stretch, nodes that thicken, materials that circulate and are transformed. The Etruscans become a test case for how archaeologists might discuss interaction without defaulting to diffusionist stories in which culture radiates outward from presumed centers.
The book’s style mirrors its method. Riva writes with controlled intelligence, favoring clarity over flourish. She is capable of evocative detail – a plateau settlement’s dominance of its surroundings, a sanctuary’s layered deposits, the way death becomes a stage for hierarchy – but she does not allow such detail to turn into romance. The prose can feel cool, particularly for readers who want ancient history to read like narrative nonfiction. Yet the coolness is a kind of ethical restraint. Riva rarely presses evidence beyond what it can sustain, and she rarely flatters the reader with false certainty.
The constraints of the evidence and of the compact format remain visible. The Etruscans who appear most sharply are those who left durable traces: elites, sanctuary patrons, those whose deaths justified large expenditures of labor and material. The lives of non-elites are present, but more in outline than in texture. Gender, labor, and everyday rhythms surface intermittently, but the analytic momentum remains focused on hierarchy, urban forms, and networks. This is not so much a failure as a reminder of what Etruscan history often is: a history whose clarity depends on what could survive and what has been allowed to survive.
There are moments when the very virtues of the book verge on austerity. Riva’s caution about what the evidence can bear is salutary, but it can also leave a reader hungry for more sensory anchoring – for the texture of craftwork, the feel of domestic space, the stubborn particularity of a shrine approached year after year. Likewise, in keeping the narrative aligned with problems and processes, the book sometimes downplays the kind of chronological tension that makes political history crackle. War, diplomacy, and named individuals surface, but usually as pressures shaping choices rather than as a cast of characters. That decision is coherent with Riva’s approach, though it means the reader must supply some of the drama that other histories provide ready-made.
And yet the restraint is precisely what distinguishes this volume from the familiar “mysterious people” genre. Riva’s Etruscans are not made alluring by ignorance. They are made intelligible by method. She repeatedly shows that what looks like absence is often the product of selective survival or selective attention, and that interpretation is never innocent. The book’s compactness becomes part of its argument: if the evidence is partial, then the historian’s task is to build a structure that can accommodate uncertainty without turning it into mystique.
One of the book’s quiet achievements, finally, is to reframe admiration itself. It is easy to admire the Etruscans for their artistry, their luxury, their proximity to Rome. Riva encourages a harder admiration: for their capacity to sustain complex urban life without the institutions we have been trained to expect, and for their ability to remain themselves while negotiating a changing Mediterranean.
For that achievement, and for the seriousness with which it treats both evidence and interpretation, I would place “A Short History of the Etruscans” at 83 out of 100. It is an introduction with an edge in the best sense – not a bid for provocation, but a sustained effort to make the Etruscans legible without making them familiar. The book leaves the reader with fewer consoling myths and more usable questions, which is, finally, a more durable kind of admiration.
The Etruscans are frequently treated as a footnote to Greece and Rome – a bridge between the “real” classics and the Italic world that Rome would later consolidate. Riva’s opening chapter insists that this relegation has a history, and that the history is inseparable from politics. Medieval indifference, Renaissance appropriation, ducal pageantry, Enlightenment collecting, nationalist scholarship, and professional archaeology each produced an Etruria fit for its moment. The result is not a simple story of progress toward truth. It is a record of interpretive regimes, each one framing the Etruscans as origin, warning, proof, or ornament. By the time Riva turns to the ancient world itself, she has already trained the reader to recognize that reception is not a sidebar – it is part of the evidence.
That historiographical framing also clarifies an old dilemma. The Etruscans left an abundance of material remains and only a frustratingly thin written record in comparison with Greece and Rome. Most of what survives in ancient literature comes through Greek and Roman filters, and those filters can be moralizing, exoticizing, or politically instrumental. Riva does not pretend this can be corrected by a single interpretive trick. Instead, she treats the tension between archaeology and textual tradition as the basic condition of the field: the past is not simply recovered, it is reconstructed through methods that have their own histories, limits, and habits of distortion. Her approach is neither defensive nor romantic. It is practical, and in its practicality, quietly radical.
From that platform the book turns, as any short history must, to beginnings. Chapter 2 is careful about what a beginning can mean. The old obsession with Etruscan “origins” – whether they arrived from Anatolia, whether they were indigenous, whether they emerged through a decisive migration – is treated as a question archaeology cannot answer in the form it is usually posed. Riva replaces the origin story with a slower, more plausible narrative of emergence. Across the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age, settlements shift and aggregate; communities relocate to plateaus and defensible high ground; burial practices begin to display widening differences in status. What looks, in older accounts, like a sudden appearance becomes, in Riva’s account, a long set of choices that rearrange landscape and society.
What makes this chapter convincing is Riva’s refusal to treat material culture as a direct proxy for ethnicity. Pots and weapons have been made to carry too much interpretive weight in the past, enlisted as badges of identity rather than read as artifacts of practice. Riva instead treats grave goods, architectural choices, and settlement movement as social signals – evidence of competition, lineage claims, and emerging leadership. The reader is nudged away from the desire to name a people as if naming were the same as knowing, and toward the harder work of describing how authority forms, stabilizes, and reproduces itself. The Etruscans begin to appear not as an ethnic puzzle, but as a society becoming legible through patterns of hierarchy.
Chapter 3 moves into the seventh century BCE, a period in which urbanization accelerates. Riva’s prose adopts the rhythm of a careful report translated into lucid argument. Urbanization is not presented as a miracle of city founding or as an automatic step toward “civilization.” It is a reorganization of space and relationships. Sites that will later be named as Etruscan towns expand in scale and complexity; cemeteries become monumental; craft production and exchange intensify. The Mediterranean is also shifting, with new and thicker networks of interaction. But Riva refuses to treat interaction as a one-way force. Contact does not arrive like enlightenment from elsewhere. It enters systems that already have their own hierarchies and ambitions.
In this chapter, funerary landscapes do much of the argumentative work. Monumental tombs are not treated merely as art-history trophies, though Riva is never indifferent to their aesthetic force. They become political architecture: materializations of lineage, property, and memory. The “city,” in this view, is not only a dense settlement. It is a set of coordinated practices through which authority becomes visible and reproducible – through burial, through sanctuary building, through control of production, and through the ability to channel exchange into social advantage. Urbanization is, therefore, not simply about where people live. It is about how power is made to endure.
The book’s most decisive conceptual intervention arrives in Chapter 4, which addresses the archaic period and introduces the idea of the Etruscan non-polis. This is the moment when Riva’s historiographical caution becomes a direct challenge to classical common sense. For generations, Etruscan cities have been compared to the Greek polis and found wanting. Where is the civic equality? Where are the assemblies and institutions? Where is the political community imagined as a body of citizens rather than a hierarchy of households and patrons? Riva’s answer is that the comparison itself is the problem. The polis is not a universal measure. It is one historical form among others. Evaluating Etruscan urbanism by its absence is a way of making Etruria into a shadow of Greece.
The implications of this argument are larger than Etruscology. If the non-polis is accepted as viable, the ancient Mediterranean becomes less a stage on which Greece provides the model and everyone else approximates it, and more a field of diverse political experiments. Riva shows sanctuaries functioning as anchors of collective life, sites where ritual can bind people who are not equal into a shared symbolic order. She shows households operating as political units, and elites performing authority through monumentality, patronage, and the management of sacred space. Urban growth, in this account, does not require democracy. Complexity does not require civic equality. The Etruscans are not a failed version of something else. They are a successful version of themselves.
Chapter 4 is also where the lure of “Hellenization” receives its most sustained critique. Riva does not deny the presence of Greek objects, myths, and artistic forms. She denies the interpretive laziness that turns presence into surrender. Greek things circulate, but their meanings are remade. A myth painted on a wall or figured in terracotta is not a declaration of Greek identity; it is a resource, selected and refitted to local needs. Imported objects travel into local systems of display, ritual, and memory; they become instruments in elite competition and markers of participation in wider networks. What is borrowed is not simply copied. It is translated. Riva’s Etruscans are not passive recipients of culture, but active negotiators of it.
Chapter 5 performs a second recalibration by revisiting the fifth century BCE, a period often narrated as Etruscan decline. Riva treats the decline narrative as a symptom of selective attention. When scholarship equates cultural vitality with monumental display, any shift away from lavish tomb building can look like collapse. But the fifth century is not empty. It is redirected. Networks extend beyond Tyrrhenian Etruria; Etruscan presence strengthens in the Po Valley and along the Adriatic; and sites associated with mobility, trade, and planned settlement reveal a society capable of reconfiguration. The question becomes not “what was lost,” but “what changed,” and why.
The emphasis on mobility is not merely geographical. It is social. Movement reshapes identity, reconfigures elite strategies, and produces new urban forms, sometimes with more regular planning than earlier towns. Riva is careful to avoid turning orthogonal planning into a Greek fingerprint. Planning is a tool that can travel without importing an entire political system. What matters is how planning serves social aims: the organization of space, the control of production, the integration of diverse populations, the stabilization of authority in new environments. In this chapter, the Etruscans are shown responding to pressure and opportunity without the melodrama of decline: by shifting where they are strong, by reorganizing how they connect, and by adapting forms without surrendering agency.
The final chapter, “Etruria and Rome,” confronts the narrative that tends to swallow all Etruscan history. Roman literary sources, written with hindsight and national mythmaking, often frame Etruria as a conquered prelude to Rome’s greatness. Modern readers, raised on Rome as destiny, can too easily accept the framing. Riva insists on contingency. Rome’s expansion into Etruria from the fourth century BCE onward was real, and its violence cannot be softened by scholarly nuance, but it was also uneven, negotiated, and opportunistic. It exploited rivalries among city-states; it produced different outcomes for different communities; it created new paths for some elites even as it foreclosed options for others.
Archaeology complicates triumphalist stories. Urban life continues in many places; sanctuaries remain active; local practices persist within new political frameworks. Some Etruscan elites gain access to Roman structures and translate their authority into the language of the expanding power. Others lose local standing and see their options narrow. Meanwhile, Rome itself absorbs Etruscan elements – in ritual, in symbolism, in forms of representation that Roman authors later naturalize as Roman. The relationship is not simply a one-way drain. It is an entanglement, producing continuity and transformation at once.
If there is a throughline across the book, it is Riva’s insistence that the Etruscans have agency, and that agency is best seen not in famous names but in choices that materialize over time. Settlement movement becomes strategy; funerary display becomes political language; sanctuary building becomes infrastructure; exchange networks become arenas of competition and cohesion. Even the encounter with Rome becomes a field of decisions rather than a slide into inevitability. Riva’s compact format forces compression, but the compression is purposeful: it keeps the narrative from hardening into the familiar drama of rise and fall.
The epilogue turns outward, connecting these arguments to broader debates about connectivity and globalization. The word “globalization” can feel like an anachronistic provocation when applied to the ancient Mediterranean, yet Riva uses it less as a slogan than as a way of naming a pattern: networks that stretch, nodes that thicken, materials that circulate and are transformed. The Etruscans become a test case for how archaeologists might discuss interaction without defaulting to diffusionist stories in which culture radiates outward from presumed centers.
The book’s style mirrors its method. Riva writes with controlled intelligence, favoring clarity over flourish. She is capable of evocative detail – a plateau settlement’s dominance of its surroundings, a sanctuary’s layered deposits, the way death becomes a stage for hierarchy – but she does not allow such detail to turn into romance. The prose can feel cool, particularly for readers who want ancient history to read like narrative nonfiction. Yet the coolness is a kind of ethical restraint. Riva rarely presses evidence beyond what it can sustain, and she rarely flatters the reader with false certainty.
The constraints of the evidence and of the compact format remain visible. The Etruscans who appear most sharply are those who left durable traces: elites, sanctuary patrons, those whose deaths justified large expenditures of labor and material. The lives of non-elites are present, but more in outline than in texture. Gender, labor, and everyday rhythms surface intermittently, but the analytic momentum remains focused on hierarchy, urban forms, and networks. This is not so much a failure as a reminder of what Etruscan history often is: a history whose clarity depends on what could survive and what has been allowed to survive.
There are moments when the very virtues of the book verge on austerity. Riva’s caution about what the evidence can bear is salutary, but it can also leave a reader hungry for more sensory anchoring – for the texture of craftwork, the feel of domestic space, the stubborn particularity of a shrine approached year after year. Likewise, in keeping the narrative aligned with problems and processes, the book sometimes downplays the kind of chronological tension that makes political history crackle. War, diplomacy, and named individuals surface, but usually as pressures shaping choices rather than as a cast of characters. That decision is coherent with Riva’s approach, though it means the reader must supply some of the drama that other histories provide ready-made.
And yet the restraint is precisely what distinguishes this volume from the familiar “mysterious people” genre. Riva’s Etruscans are not made alluring by ignorance. They are made intelligible by method. She repeatedly shows that what looks like absence is often the product of selective survival or selective attention, and that interpretation is never innocent. The book’s compactness becomes part of its argument: if the evidence is partial, then the historian’s task is to build a structure that can accommodate uncertainty without turning it into mystique.
One of the book’s quiet achievements, finally, is to reframe admiration itself. It is easy to admire the Etruscans for their artistry, their luxury, their proximity to Rome. Riva encourages a harder admiration: for their capacity to sustain complex urban life without the institutions we have been trained to expect, and for their ability to remain themselves while negotiating a changing Mediterranean.
For that achievement, and for the seriousness with which it treats both evidence and interpretation, I would place “A Short History of the Etruscans” at 83 out of 100. It is an introduction with an edge in the best sense – not a bid for provocation, but a sustained effort to make the Etruscans legible without making them familiar. The book leaves the reader with fewer consoling myths and more usable questions, which is, finally, a more durable kind of admiration.
April 15, 2021
This book is a refreshing break from the thematic overviews characteristic of short histories. The first chapter could be defined as the Epistemology of the Etruscans - how we know what we know. The book then proceeds more or less chronologically through Etruscan history mainly through the vehicle of archaeology, the early Roman historians summarily dismissed. On the way, Riva discusses religion, urbanisation, colonisation before Etruria's eventual absorption into the Roman Republic, and beyond.
The book is comprehensively referenced throughout, with adequate maps provided, with a good selection of photos - frequently sourced from Wikimedia Commons. Highly recommended!
The book is comprehensively referenced throughout, with adequate maps provided, with a good selection of photos - frequently sourced from Wikimedia Commons. Highly recommended!
May 5, 2024
This is an academic book, which means it's basically someone's graduate/professorial paper and written for other people who understand academic writing styles. So if you're reading this to get a narrative or pop history, prepare to be disappointed. But if you still want to read it, I would suggest saving chapter 1 for last since it's a history of the archeology of Etruria starting in the 1500s.
Ultimately it's a great summary. I'm just picky with my 5 stars.
Ultimately it's a great summary. I'm just picky with my 5 stars.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews