One of the oldest public museums in Europe, founded in 1761 and housed in a sixteenth-century palazzo. The collection focuses on Etruscan funerary art: over 600 alabaster and terracotta urns, many still bearing traces of paint, along with bronze figurines, jewellery, and household objects. The elongated bronze figure known as the Ombra della Sera (Evening Shadow) — a thin, attenuated male figure that uncannily anticipates Giacometti — is the most famous single piece.
Museo Etrusco Guarnacci
One of Europe's oldest museums, rich in Etruscan art
A story
Among the museum's 600 funerary urns is the Urna degli Sposi — the "Urn of the Spouses" — showing an elderly couple reclining together, carved with a realism and tenderness unusual for Etruscan art. The American writer D.H. Lawrence, who visited in 1927, wrote that the figures had "a queer naturalness" and seemed more alive than much classical Greek sculpture.