- Giuseppe Sassatelli and Elisabetta Govi –
The funeral offerings from the tombs include items of Etruscan production and Attic
imports associated with the banquet and the symposium. Large vessels (kraters, amphorae
and stamnoi), cups and utensils (strainers, ladles and jugs) allude to the preparation and
consumption of wine. In a well-known tomb of the Giardini Margherita necropolis,
sumptuous vessels of the funerary offerings were grouped around and over a folding stool
of ivory, the sella curulis that belonged to a local magistrate (Fig. 15.9). The tomb offers
a picture of an urban society in which political offi ce, rather than wealth, indicates the
social rank of the deceased, as shown by the stone tomb-markers produced in the mid-
fi fth century bc, the so-called “Felsina stelae,” horseshoe-shaped and decorated in low
relief. Indeed, they represent the various social categories (the hoplite, the knight, the
priest, the mature man, young woman, etc.), but on the most monumental tombstones,
decorated with multiple registers, there also appear scenes of processions with characters
bearing emblems that pay homage to the deceased, or in particularly solemn ceremonies,
including the conduct of games in honour of the deceased, which refer to the deceased
as vested with an important role in the political and institutional realm (Fig. 15.10). In
some exceptional cases we fi nd an explicit reference through inscriptions citing the offi ce
of zilath, the supreme urban magistracy whose functions are similar to those of a Latin
praetor. The imagery of the “Felsina stelae,” a unique phenomenon in the panorama of
Etruscan sculpture, also reveals the salient traits of funerary ideology that at this stage
focuses on the concept of the journey to the Afterlife and the change in status that death
causes. And in tune with the Greek ideological universe, mutated in the region of Etruria
Padana through commercial contacts, pictures of demonic psychopompoi and Charon
himself with an oar accompany the transit of the deceased to the Afterlife (Fig. 15.11).
Figure 15.8 Herakles and Apollo from the acropolis of Villa Cassarini in Bologna (Soprintendenza per
i Beni Archeologici dell’Emilia Romagna).Figure 15.9 Goods from the “Tomb of the Folding Stool” of Bologna
(Museo Civico Archeologico di Bologna).