Villa Giulia — National Etruscan Museum

Long before Rome existed as a city, the Etruscans dominated central Italy, and much of what Romans later claimed as their own — the toga, gladiatorial combat, augury, even elements of temple architecture — was inherited or adapted from Etruscan culture. Villa Giulia, built between 1551 and 1553 as a pleasure retreat for Pope Julius III, has housed the National Etruscan Museum since 1889 and holds, by wide consensus, the finest collection of Etruscan material anywhere in the world.

Its single most famous object is the Sarcophagus of the Spouses, a 6th-century BC terracotta funerary monument from Cerveteri showing a husband and wife reclining together at a banquet, both smiling with an unmistakable warmth and intimacy rare in ancient funerary art — a deliberately tender image that upends assumptions about how distant and formal ancient burial customs were. Nearby, gold jewellery, bronze mirrors, and painted terracotta temple decorations fill out a civilization that left no surviving literature of its own and has largely had to be reconstructed from tombs.