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Hello in the late 1920s D. H. Lawrence spent several years living in Italy. There he became fascinated by the tombs and artistic

works of a civilization which had flourished in Tuscany in the 1st millennium BC. Not the ancient Romans,

but their neighbors, the Etrusans. In one of his last books,

Etruscan places, Lawrence wrote, Italy today is far more Etruscan in its pulse than

Roman and will always be so. For our 800 years the Etruscan's

controlled much of Western Italy. They built ciders with grand temples and created

beautiful works of art. They're also credited with introducing the alphabet to Western Europe.

But the Etruscan's have received much less attention in their Romans, perhaps because

few of their written records have survived, although modern scholarship

as much to tell us about who they were and what they did.

With me to discuss the Etruscan Civilization, Phil Perkins, professor of archaeology at the Open University, David Ridgeway, Senior Research Fellow at

the Institute of Classical Studies at the University of London, and Karina Riva, lecturer in Mediterranean

Archaeology at University College in London.

...