Alive and buried
It is the 1840s, that most surprising and significant of decades, and we are on a road somewhere in central Italy, between Florence and Rome. Nowadays, in the manner of Italian roads, this would be lined with billboards advertising the local cement works or sausage-maker, and each lay-by would be the haunt, in summer, of leather-miniskirted Brazilian whores pout- ing ferociously at the passing truckers. In the 1840s, however, the sole distraction is provided by an occasional party of brig- ands, whom the Papal or Grand Ducal police, after a little chivvying and some well-placed bribes, will round up with a good deal of self-conscious bravado, to be exhibited in the local fortress for the edifi- cation of curious visitors.
We too are curious, but we are not just any old tourists, having set out from Arez- zo or Perugia with the express purpose of inspecting the Etruscan tombs, about which a traveller, met last night at the inn, has got us suitably excited. He is a Mr George Dennis, and an invaluable guide he proves to be, deciphering the mysterious lettering of ancient inscriptions, voluble on the beauties of mural painting and decorated vases, while assuring us, in this age of Mazzini and Garibaldi, that 'political free- dom was a plant which flourished not among the Etruscans'.
In 1848, the very year, indeed, when lat- terday Etruscans savoured a brief political freedom, Dennis, returning to England, published his The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria. Its two densely layered volumes, with their line drawings, fold-out maps and engraved prospects, emerged once more, fifty years later, in an Everyman's Library reprint, Dennis having died meanwhile and failed to qualify for entry to the Dictionary of National Biography. Selling very few copies of a limited print-run, Everyman dropped The Cities and Cemeteries from its list, and that, since 1907, is that.
A pity really, since the book happens to be a regular copper-bottomed masterpiece, readable as a travel guide, as a work of meticulous antiquarian scholarship, or as the document of a personal obsession pur- sued to the frontiers of madness and hence as a species of autobiography, often oblique but strangely gripping. And though much, of course, has been discovered since about the Etruscans, their language, origins and customs, Dennis is still their most com- pelling interpreter.
Not that you need to be particularly enthralled by old pots and damp tomb chambers to relish The Cities. Few of Dennis's readers would have been troubled by not knowing that the king and queen of the Etruscan gods were called Tinia and Cupra or that the goddess of fate was aptly named Mean, let alone that the inhabitants of the ancient cities of Veii and Caere were celebrated for the sophistication of their waste-disposal systems.
Ignorant though we may be and not always thirsty for enlightenment, what keeps us bowling ahead in this wonderful book is the mixture of Dennis's manic enthusiasm with a resistless sense of atmo- sphere, coloured by a prose-style weirdly marrying Gibbonian grandeur to the tech- nicolour flushes and gushes of Mr Rad- cliffe in The Mysteries of Udolpho:
Deep is the dreariness of that moor. The sun gilds but brightens it not. The scene is replete with matter for melancholy reflection deep- ened by the sense that the demon of malaria has here set up his throne and rendered this once densely-peopled spot a land accursed.
But no malaria is going to stop the author from scrambling up and down the `No dear I never married, but I was very attached to a young gentleman once.' necropolis of Vulci, ecstatic, on the one hand, over decorated ostrich eggs or unguent jars in the form of bare-breasted goddesses, furious, on the other, at the rifling of the tombs by the Princess of Canino's servants, who crush rare vases and figurines underfoot in their search for gold. Thus Dennis bounces onwards among urns and skulls, printed sarcophagi and rock-hewn sepulchres, quivering with the rage and jubilation which lend his book a kind of greatness.
His eye missed nothing. Modern archae- ology is an exact science of grave goods, occupational layers and post-hole measure- ments, but Dennis, as a Victorian amateur, could afford to turn aside from his Etr- uscan passions to tell us about Signora Palandri, the fat landlady of Grosseto, 'a living monument to the elasticity of the human frame', the greedy customs officers at Civitavecchia, the miraculous presence of St Christina's footprints on the rocks at Bolsena or the hideous salt-pans near Corneto, where 'the doganiere turns his face to the waveless, slimy expanse which mocks his woe with its dazzling joy'. For unrestrained, rhapsodic purple, try his evocation of Orvieto cathedral or the view from Volterra's walls, under morning light, across the desolate Maremma to the sea.
The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria is not to be read at a single sitting. With its rich expanses of footnotes, tunnelled by refer- ence to Plutarch, Strabo or Herodotus, its flippant sideswipes at figures (such as dotty old Sir William Betham, Ulster King of Arms, who believed the Etruscans had colonised Ireland, or Mrs Hamilton Grey, whom Dennis resented merely because she too had written a good book on Etrurian tombs), and its author's fondness for spout- ing bits of Shelley and Byron, the whole thing resembles some nourishing cake or biscuit off which we break occasional bits for a sustaining chew. Against a back- ground of the old travellers' Italy of Berlioz, Mendelssohn and Dickens, a land of garlic-smelling opera houses, swarming beggars and verminous beds, The Cities sounds an inextinguishable paean to values our own age scorns or fears, the values of a single amateur's curiosity and enthusiasm. Without them or a decent modern edition of Dennis's book, we are the losers.
Jonathan Keates
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