New exhibition cycle dedicated to Etruscan Metropolis launches

Fondazione Luigi Rovati announces the new cycle Etruscan Metropolis with the opening of the exhibition Vulci. Producing for Men. Producing for the gods (March 20 to August 4, 2024).

The series of exhibitions Etruscan Metropolis is dedicated to some of the major Etruscan cities understood not only as urban realities, but also as places of historical complexity, according to the effective definition of the Greek Thucydides, for whom "It is men who make a city, not walls or ships".

The series begins with Vulci, one of the most dynamic cities of Etruria, the site of important manufacturing activities and a strategic junction in the trade routes between Etruria and the Mediterranean.

The cycle introduces to the Foundation Museum a line of research on cities that, as they form and develop, become much more than city-burgs, metropolitan city systems. In fact, they are created as an integration of places of garrison and control of the territory, which expand and strengthen over time, socially, culturally and economically. The occupation of the territory occurs according to a double dynamic: on the one hand by enlarging the structure of the inhabiting population, and on the other by determining in the metropolitan fabric a specific and distinctive purpose of economic and cultural anthropological character. Enlargement of population weight is part of a design of strategic force and moves, in a modern way, not by accumulations but by connections and linkages: a kind of modern city-network. A network that identifies itself by what it does: the production of crafts, as in the case of Vulci, or as in the case of Populonia in the production of industry, or, as in Tarquinia, in the self-referential production of oneself, the grounding as identity.

A dynamic explored in the progressive research curated by the Foundation, in various steps up to the final one that will experimentally measure the statistical, demographic and economic structure of the Etruscan metropolis. Specific entities in history but also current model in the contemporaneity of a planet that in 2050 will be inhabited by more than 10 billion individuals for 75% in metropolitan cities. A model generated precisely by the Etruscan metropolises.