Day 14: WED 1/20: cities of the dead

I woke up early at 7:00. I was not going to be late. We were out the door by 7:45- we had to be there by 8:30. We all traveled in a group walking first, then by tram, then by bus but we made it on time. The Termini train station was a grand building- modern and streamlined and covered in marble. We went and waited inside- I got a croissant and some of the guys were overwhelmed with joy to find a McDonalds that serves breakfast. We met up with all of our group and then got to the bus. Excuse me, “coach” as they call it over here. This thing was nice. Huge, spacious, new inside and out with reclining seats and a bathroom DOWN a tiny flight of stairs. It even had an ESPRESSO MAKER built in at the front of the bus. It was the most Italian bus I had ever seen. We sped off throughout town and out through the gates of the ancient city wall. I tried to get some sleep but it was hard at first because the historian with us kept talking in the microphone and I had a speaker right above my head. An hour and a half later- we were there: the city of the dead or the "Necropolis". The Necropolis is in a small town called Tarquinia which used to be a Vatican state. It is on a hill by the sea and is heavily fortified. We visited a bunch of elaborate ancient tombs. Apparently they have discovered over 6000 of them but we got to see some of the best preserved tombs. After that we went to the museum nearby that was filled with ancient Etruscan artifacts, including a lot of pottery and vases. There were no cameras allowed :(. Etruscans were very advanced because they had built all the tombs and women were equal with men in their society. After that we had lunch at what seemed to be the only open restaurant. It took a long time to serve everyone and we were about 30 minutes late. We all piled in the bus and squeezed through the tiny roads to the tiny town of Cerveteri. Cerveteri is a farm town that only until the 1980s discovered it was on top of thousands of graves. Most of them are still covered and are sitting wide open on public property or farm land. We went to a museum type place that had sectioned off some excavated big specimens that were in good shape. When it got dark we piled back on the Italian bus and were off to the city. We hopped a bus back to the apartment from the Piramide.