Clusium
By the time it appears in Livy's History, it is already a major Etruscan city being petitioned for assistance against the republican partisans of ancient Rome.
In this theory, Etruscans from the coast or from the Aegean resettled and renamed an Umbrian city called Camars,[5] which the exponents believe means "marshland" in Italic.
[citation needed] On enclosing the city with a wall they changed the name to "enclosure", using an Etruscanized form, Clevsin, of the perfect passive participle, clusus, of Latin cludere, "to close".
The limited known Etruscan vocabulary[citation needed] includes camthi, the name of a magistracy, which might be segmented cam-thi, where -thi is a known locative ending.
[citation needed] It is believed that Clusium joined the Etruscan League of twelve cities in the 600s BC, to defend against the Roman king Tarquinius Priscus.
[7] In 508 BC, after the siege of Rome, Porsena split his forces and sent part of the Clusian army with his son Aruns to besiege the Latin city of Aricia.
[8] Pliny the Elder wrote that a magnificent tomb was built for Porsena; a large mausoleum surrounded by cascades of pyramids over a labyrinth of underground chambers in which an intruder could get lost.
Large-size tumuli of the late archaic period were built at Chiusi, and modern scholars have tried to associate these (especially Poggio Gaiella) with the legendary tomb of Porsena.
When the Romans refused to hand over the Fabii and in fact appointed two members of the family as consuls for the next year, the enraged Gauls broke up their siege and under the leadership of Brennus they marched onto and subsequently sacked Rome.
From one of the earliest of these came the famous François Vase; another is the tomb of Poggio Renzo, or della Scimmia (the monkey), with several chambers decorated with archaic paintings.
The most remarkable group of tombs is, however, that of Poggio Gaiella [it], 3 miles to the north, where the hill is honeycombed with chambers in three storeys (however, much ruined and inaccessible), partly connected by a system of passages, and supported at the base by a stone wall which forms a circle and not a square, a fact which renders impossible its identification with the tomb of Porsena.
Other noteworthy tombs are those of the Granduca, with a single subterranean chamber carefully constructed in travertine, and containing eight sarcophagi of the same material; of Vigna Grande, very similar to this; of Colle Casuccini (the ancient stone door of which is still in working order), with two chambers, containing paintings representing funeral rites; of Poggio Moro and Valdacqua, in the former of which the paintings are almost destroyed, while the latter is now inaccessible.
[6] A conception of the size of the whole necropolis may be gathered from the fact that nearly three thousand Etruscan inscriptions have come to light from Clusium and its district alone, while the part of Etruria north of it as far as the Arno has produced barely five hundred.
[6] Two Christian catacombs were found near Clusium, one in the hill of Santa Caterina near the railway station, the inscriptions of which seem to go back to the 3rd century, another 1 mile to the east in a hill on which a church and monastery of St Mustiola stood, which goes back to the 4th century, including among its inscriptions one bearing the date 303, and the tombstone of L. Petronius Dexter, bishop of Clusium, who died in 322.
[6] In 2004 Professor of Urban Restoration Giuseppe Centauro suggested that the traditional location of Clusium at Chiusi is wrong and that it is near Florence.
