Villanovan Culture

In the first millennium BC cultural processes took place in Italy which would continue until the Roman conquest. Regional cultural areas brought forward by these processes, mainly known through cemteries, roughly correspond to August Regions.

During the first centuries of Iron Age (IX-VII century BC) some regions of peninsular Italy, namely Etruria (Tuscany, western Umbria, and northern Lazio), Campania, Emilia-Romagna (the Bologna plain and Verucchio), and Marche (Fermo) were marked by the diffusion of a cultural aspect which has been called "Villanovan", having been identified for the first time, in 1858, in a necropolis in Villanova near Bologna, by the Bolognese scholar Giovanni Gozzadini.

This cultural aspect is characterised by crematory funeral rite, where the ashes are deposited in a vase moulded in a particular way (two-cone-shaped, usually covered by a turned over bowl), and by the shape and decoration of a certain a number of objects.

A famous etruscologist, Massimo Pallottino argued that because of the continuity between the two, the Villanovan culture can be considered as "the earliest stage of the Etruscan civilisation"; his thesis was accepted by almost all the historians of Etruria. Yet, recently, Renato Peroni, one of the most respected Italian prehistorians, taking into consideration the important differences existing between the various Villanovan areas, has doubted whether an "ethnic group ever existed identifying itself with the Villanovan rite". He, therefore, also refuses a straightforward identification of Villanovans and Etruscans. He rather thinks, that complex processes are likely to have taken place, integrating multiethnic communities which eventually acquired, in the proto-urban phase, a single ethnic identity. At this stage, in several occasions, the Etruscan component would have overcome the others, imposing its own identity to the whole community.

Discussion remains, thus, open; the situation of Verucchio, still partially unknown to scholars, could provide important contributions to these issues. In fact, though Verucchio belongs to the Villanovan culture, it shows peculiar characteristics, namely the consistent presence, in the funeral grave goods, of items originating from different cultural and perhaps ethnic backgrounds. Mixed elements include the types of objects used, as well as the ritual context, which is, perhaps, the best mean for a social group to express its identity.