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by Morris M. Weiss (Author)
The Mystery of the Tuscan Hills is a personal travel account on how to find the ancient Etruscan civilization in contemporary Italy. The author is a practicing cardiologist who, at age 40, began working at classical dig sites around the Mediterranean Sea, toiling in the summer sun as a "grunt"-coupling that with study trips over the past 25 years. The sites discussed and visited include all phases of Etruscan history and culture, from the 9th Century BC until the 3rd Century BC, when Roman might destroyed and absorbed the society. However, enough remains to provide a lifetime of study and travel opportunities. This monograph encompasses a series of portraits, or snapshots, of the Etruscans-as the author perceives them. It is not an encyclopedia of Etruscan sites and cultural history, nor a detailed travel book of Tuscany. This book will be surrounded on a bookshelf filled with elaborate coffee-table tomes of the flowers, birds, villas and museums in Tuscany, and traditional travel guides-most repeating the same information. The Mystery of the Tuscan Hills reveals a Tuscany that most travelers drive through or around, and view from a distance, but rarely "see." Learning to understand the Etruscans will also allow the traveler to get his hands around this exquisite space-one of Earth's Edens. This book is an attempt to better understand the Etruscan mind. Just as a great painter exposes the inner-self of the subject on the canvas, the successful biographer must explore the psyche of his subject, and not simply present a dry, scientific history of dates, battles and plagues. This monograph, as it rambles through Etruria (Tuscany), will paint a portrait of the Etruscans as we understand them in the 21st Century-not a simple task, since their written language has defied translation.
