Chiusi

The town boasts over three thousand years of history. The first traces of the presence of man in these hills where today's town is located, goes back to the late Bronze Age (1300 to 1200 BC). Foundations of huts, remains of hearths and objects from daily life have been found. Even more important is the evidence of the "Villanviano" period (900 to 800 BC) whose presence not only on the hills of today's town, but also all over the nearby hills of Monte San Paolo and Montevenere, lead us to understand that the town's ancient inhabitants, descended from nearby Monte di Cetona, lived in villages comprised of huts on the three main hills that enclosed the southern Val di Chiana.

Between the end of the 8th century BC and the beginning fo the 7th century BC the urban Etruscan civilisation developed, whose leaders, as in nearby Cetona, were landowning princes who soon fortified the present town of Chiusi. One of these poweful princes, Porsenna, was able, at the end of the 6th century BC, to expand Chiusi's power and even conquer Rome. Splendid testimony of this period is an Attic ceramic masterpiece from the 6th century BC imported to Chiusi, the "Vaso Français", today exhibited in the Archaeological Museum in Florence, as are other beautiful pieces exhibited in the Chiusi museum.

At the start of the 4th century BC the town was so rich that it became the object of invasion by the Gauls, who besieged the town. Briefly affected by Hannibal's invasion which defeated the Romans at Trasimeno (217 BC), the town entered into the sphere of Rome, becoming first a colony and then a municipality of Rome.

It was the first town in Tuscany to where Christianity spread, probably brought by a soldier or merchant arriving in Chiusi from the Via Cassia. In the 4th century AD Chiusi already had its own dioscese and its own bishop, buried in the catacombs of Santa Mustiola.

Occupied and destroyed many times over during the Gothi-Byzantine war (538-544), at the end of the 4th century AD the town was occupied by the Longobards who turned it into one of the main duchies of central Italy.

Fought over in the Middle Ages by the Guelphs from Orvieto and the Ghibellines from Siena, shortly after 1000 AD the decline of Chiusi began due to the waterlogging of the land.

In fact, the marshes, as can be seen from a bird's eye view of the Val di Chiana drawn be Leonardo da Vinci (see map on left), covered the territory from the Lago di Montepulciano to the Lago di Chiusi and reached to just below Citta della Pieve. Malaria depopulated the town and the countryside until, at the end of the 18th century, the Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo ordered the draining of the plain of Chiusi which was completed by the mid 1800s.

Following this came the agricultural, economic and demographic rebirth of the the town and with this also came the first archaeological discoveries. This made Chiusi, in the 1800s, one of the most important centers for scholars and important people who came to visit the excavations and the many private museums, though this fomented the antiquities market, with the loss of many of the town's treasures. Modern archaeological tourism was born from this, and today Chiusi is one of the most visited centers in the area.

Text by Enrico Barni