In 1637 he published in Ethruscarum antiquitatum fragmenta (Frankfurt, 1637) the artefacts he had allegedly discovered in 1634-35 near his family's estate at Scornello, a hilltop near the city of Volterra.

Curzio, who was nineteen years old at the time, unearthed a little capsule made of wax, resin, pitch, hair and mud containing ancient writings purportedly written in an undecipherable Etruscan script and in Latin.

In reality, the discoveries were ingeniously fabricated by Inghirami, inspired by the forger of Etruscan antiquities Annio da Viterbo (1437-1502).

Leo Allatius definitively demonstrated that all the texts were fake in his polemic Animadversiones in antiquitatum etruscarum fragmenta (Paris, 1640), a work of considerable importance for the development of codicology.

Despite being a fake, this work had the merit of "focusing the scholars' attention on Etruscan archaeology, also anticipating the elevation of this civilisation's culture and the anti-roman attitude that are characteristic of XVIII century Etruscology".