The Etruscans, a revenant and unusual people, had an Italian empire before the Greeks and Romans did. By the start of the Christian era their wooden temples and writings had vanished, the Romans and the early church had melted their bronze statues, and the people had assimilated. After the last Etruscan augur served the Romans as they fought back the Visigoths in 408 CE, the civilization disappeared but for ruins, tombs, art, and vases.
No other lost culture disappeared as completely and then returned to the same extent as the Etruscans. Indeed, no other ancient Mediterranean people was as controversial both in its time and in posterity. Though the Greeks and Romans tarred them as superstitious and decadent, D.H. Lawrence praised their way of life as offering an alternative to modernity. In The Etruscans in the Modern Imagination Sam Solecki chronicles their unexpected return to intellectual and cultural history, beginning with eighteenth-century scholars, collectors, an
