Norchia lingers long in the mind. Its appeal is not at all easy to define. The landscape is magical, but hardly more so than that of many other parts of Italy. Perhaps it is the melancholic sense of solitariness. Perhaps it is the romance of a lost realm, secreted below a woodland canopy that conceals two parallel sparkling streams. Perhaps its Etruscan spirit entwined with a near-secret medieval castle and the haunting ruin of a church with its crypt laid bare to the expansive Latium skies.
The father of Etruscan archaeology, the young George Dennis, tramping these open pastures in the 1840s with his friend, the painter Samuel Ainsley, could scarcely contain his excitement on discovering Norchia: ‘At length we turned a corner in the glen, and lo! a grand range of monuments burst upon us. There were – a line of sepulchres, high in the face of the cliff which forms the right-hand barrier of the glen, two or three hundred feet above the stream – an amphitheatre of tombs!’
In his thousand-page treatise, Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (1848), Dennis compared the scale of Norchia’s monuments to the Colosseum in Rome and judged this was ‘the most imposing spot in the whole compass of Etruscan cemeteries’. Dennis’ mark on Etruscology was not to be equalled until a century later, when the Rome scholar Massimo Pallottino included it in La Sapienza’s new archaeological curriculum. No less taken with Norchia than the legendary Victorian, in his lyrical introduction to D H Lawrence’s Etruscan Places (1986), Pallottino wrote with unvarnished passion about the place:
