Tumulo di Montecalvario historical timeline

It was built for a family that controlled a crossroads. The tomb was certainly the property of an aristocratic family whose wealth must have been linked to the fortunate geographical position of the place, which lay on the principal communication routes of the epoch. The museum names them more directly: the lords who dominated the surroundings of Castellina at the end of the 7th century BC.

That was the Orientalizing moment in Etruria. Between 720 and 580 BC the Etruscan elites acquired luxurious products and cultural models expressing the splendour of the courts of the Near East; the new lords controlled the transit routes that followed the watercourses, lived in complex buildings under decorated tile roofs, surrounded themselves with precious objects and built imposing sepulchres. The ridges of the Chianti were part of that network because the significant watercourses rise here — the Arbia, the Ombrone, the Pesa and the Greve — and Montecalvario is the proof of it, alongside the burials of Malpensata at Radda, the Poggino at Fonterutoli and the Poggione at Castelnuovo Berardenga.

Then a very long interval. The mound has been known since the 16th century, which in practice means it was available to be emptied: almost all of its grave goods were dispersed and looted over the years, and the tomb had already been sacked by the time it was properly opened.

The modern excavation is early twentieth-century. The four tombs were brought back to light in the first years of the 1900s, and the iron and bronze decorations of the chariot were unearthed in 1915. The Museo Archeologico del Chianti, which opened in 2006, dates itself explicitly as arriving a century after the excavation of the tumulus.

Its name arrived in between. In the medieval period a chapel stood on the mound for the last station of the Via Crucis, and Montecalvario is what the place has been called since.

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