The oldest-known inscriptions in Etruscan, a non-Indo-European language isolate, date back to the end of the 8th century, right after the shift from the rural Villanovian culture, documented in the same area in the 9th century B.C., to an urban society.
The Etruscan cities were independent states that shared a language and a religion but never formed a political unit. From around 900 to 400 BC, the Etruscans were the most innovative, powerful, wealthy, and creative people in Italy. The Etruscans had come to control Etruria, a land just north of the Palatine, by about 8oo BC.
By the sixth century BC Etruscan civilization was flourishing across northern and central Italy, and their influence stretched from Latium to the Po Plain. It is during this period that the Etruscan city located at Forcello (Bagnolo San Vito, Mantova) emerged.
Although situated at the northernmost periphery of the Etruscan world, active trade routes linking Etruria, the Adriatic, and central Europe ran through the site and, together with neighboring Mantova, Forcello formed part of an influential network of northern Etruscan cities that mediated inter-regional exchange.
It was Etruscans who built the triple temple on the Capitol, the most sacred spot in Rome; and that Etruscans had stamped their ideas upon the dress and the pomp of the supreme magistrates, and especially on their behavior in the crowning moment of their career, their return in victory from war.
Military defeats, the Roman expansion, and progressive assimilation caused a decline of the Etruscan cities, which lost their autonomy when Roman citizenship was granted to the Roman allies.
Etruscans people
