The Etruscan treasures of the Tarquinia necropolis, UNESCO World Heritage Site, make this town one of the most precious and renowned archaeological sites in the world, above all thanks to the spectacular paintings of the underground tombs, representing snapshots of a culture that has 3000 years of history.
On the other hand, here in Tarquinia, you can’t help being struck by the wide open fields and lawns landscape, that surround these archaeological treasures, bounded by the see from one side and by the higher internal hills’s profile from the opposite side, that delimit the so-called Lazio’s Maremma region. losing yourself in the immensity is the definition that perhaps best describes the feeling that is felt through this open landscape, where trees are rare. At first glance, the desolation could be felt to be mistress, because this expanse appears as the inhospitable domain of the "agricultural industry", which has erased, wherever it has been applied, every sign of naturalness; but this landscape actually is the output of the persistence of the immense Roman latifundia structures of the lower Empire and has remained substantially unchanged over the centuries, becoming the great ecclesiastical and aristocratic estates centered on the fields and lawns landscape: endless cereals crops and pastures for livestock. Furthermore this scenario became the winter pole of the livestock transhumance epic. While walking between these gentle and open hills, that appear almost velvety, softly shaped by ditches and streams bordered by reeds, you come across various grasslands, crops and pastures dominated from time to time by different cultivated or wild species and you meet that animal community that prefers the absence of tree cover to establish its habitat. The traces of human presence, starting from the Etruscans, attested in the Plain of the “Cività”, the ancient Tarchna (=Tarquinia in Etruscan), witnesses the settling strategy of reserving the hilltops for human inhabiting, in order to exploit the precious and fertile soils in these lands, while protecting themselves from malaria: the scourge that has always influenced the human settlement in the coastal areas.
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