Tumulo di Montecalvario site features

What survives is a shape in the ground. A mound over fifty metres in diameter, with four entrances cut into it at the four cardinal points — the clearest piece of deliberate design on the site, and the thing that makes it read as a monument rather than a hill.

Each tomb is entered by a dromos, a sunken access corridor running in from the edge of the mound. The north tomb's dromos is the one usually photographed.

The plan was more ambitious than the execution. Four chambers with vaulted coverings, each fronted by a vestibule with two small side cells, was the intention. The west tomb never got its minor cells. The north tomb never got a main chamber. The tumulus was abandoned unfinished.

It was robbed before anyone recorded it. The mound has been known since the 16th century, and almost all of its grave goods were dispersed and looted over the years; by the time of the modern discovery the tomb had already been sacked, and very few objects were recovered inside it.

What did survive dates it. Fragments of the grave goods were identified as bronze, ivory and glass paste, placing the tomb in the archaic age. The finds are of a kind not far removed from those of the tombs of Quinto, of Camucia, of the Sodo at Cortona and of the residence at Murlo.

Nothing is interpreted on site. The objects, the reconstruction and the explanation are all in the Museo Archeologico del Chianti in the Rocca, which devotes an entire room to this tumulus.

Four chambers on the cardinal points

The defining feature, and the reason the monument has attracted attention far beyond its region. The arrangement by the points of the compass, together with the sections of the hypogeal chambers and the form of the mound, has led to the supposition that the tumulus was a source of inspiration for Leonardo da Vinci's mausoleum — a suggestion, carefully flagged as such in the record, not a documented fact.

A chariot, found in 1915

The outstanding object from the tumulus is a parade chariot, the standout piece of the rich grave goods of one of the four tombs. Its iron and bronze decorations were unearthed in 1915, and the chariot has been reconstructed and clad in its decorated laminae in the museum at Castellina. The Fondazione Musei Senesi dates it to the end of the 7th and the first decades of the 6th century BC and calls it a find of extraordinary beauty and rarity, with few equals of its kind in all northern Etruria.

The head that guarded the south tomb

The principal find from the tomba sud is a stone head of a big cat, jaws open, perhaps part of the architectural decoration; the Fondazione describes it as a menacing feline head in pietra serena, set in defence of the southern tomb.

An unfinished project

The west tomb lacks its side cells and the north tomb has no main chamber. Whatever stopped the work stopped it part-built, which is itself informative: this was a programme, not an accretion.

A medieval name on an Etruscan thing

Montecalvario — Calvary — is the name of the chapel that stood here for the last station of the Via Crucis, fully two thousand years after the tomb was dug.