In Larth's company, visit those places that almost three thousand years ago witnessed the rise and decline of powerful cities and which today, in the silence of abandon, still preserve an echo of the passions of the people who lived there. The ancient region of Etruria lies in central Italy, bounded on the North by the mountainous chain of the Tuscan-Emilian Appennines and on the South by the River Tiber, on which the city of Rome stands. Cities once known and respected throughout the Mediterranean, were condemned to decadence and oblivion by the Roman conquest. Today the cities talk to us through the finds unearthed in the excavations and tombs of their former inhabitants. This itinerary, along the southern coast of Etruria, goes through the three important cities of Caere (present day Cerveteri), Tarquinia and Vulci.