below the town. In the first
civil war, Papirius Carbo took up his position here, and two battles
occurred in the neighbourhood. Sulla appears to have increased the
number of colonists, and a statue was certainly erected in his honour
here. In imperial times we hear little of it, though its grain and
grapes were famous. Christianity found its way into Clusium as early as
the 3rd century, and the tombstone of a bishop of A.D. 322 exists. In
A.D. 540 it is named as a strong place to which Vitiges sent a garrison
of a thousand men.

Of pre-Roman or Roman buildings in the town itself there are few
remains, except for some fragments of the Etruscan town walls composed
of rather small rectangular blocks of travertine, built into the
medieval fortifications. Under it, however, extends an elaborate system
of rock-cut passages, probably drains. The chief interest of the place
lies in its extensive necropolis, which surrounds the city on all sides.
The earliest tombs (_tombe a pozzo_, shaft tombs) are previous to the
beginning of Greek importation. Of _tombe a fosso_ there are none, and
the next stage is marked by the so-called _tombe a ziro_, in which the
cinerary urn (often with a human head) is placed in a large clay jar
(_ziro_, Lat. _dolium_). These belong to the 7th century B.C., and are
followed by the _tombe a camera_, in which the tomb is a chamber hewn in
the rock, and which can be traced back to the beginning of the 6th
century B.C. From one of the earliest of these came the famous Francois
vase; another is the tomb of Poggio Renzo, or della Scimmia (the
monkey), with several chambers decorated with archaic paintings. The
most remarkable group of tombs is, however, that of Poggio Gaiella, 3 m.
to the N., where the hill is honeycombed with chambers in three storeys
(now, however, much ruined and inaccessible), partly connected by a
system of passages, and supported at the base by a stone wall which
forms a circle and not a square--a fact which renders impossible its
identification with the tomb of Porsena, the description of which Pliny
(_Hist. Nat._ xxxvi. 91) has copied from Varro. Other noteworthy tombs
are those of the Granduca, with a single subterranean chamber carefully
constructed in travertine, and containing eight sarcophagi of the same
material; of Vigna Grande, very similar to this; of Colle Casuccini (the
ancient stone door of which is still in working order), with two
chambers, containing paintings represe