. 24,
and see Andrea's house, on the right, marked with a tablet.

In the Via della Colonna we find, at No. 26 on the left, the Palazzo
Crocetta, which is now a Museum of Antiquities, and for its Etruscan
exhibits is of the greatest historical value and interest to visitors
to Tuscany, such as ourselves. For here you may see what civilization
was like centuries before Christ and Rome. The beginnings of the
Etruscan people are indistinct, but about 1000 B.C. has been agreed
to as the dawn of their era. Etruria comprised Tuscany, Perugia,
and Rome itself. Florence has no remains, but Fiesole was a fortified
Etruscan town, and many traces of its original builders may be seen
there, together with Etruscan relics in the little museum. For the
best reconstructions of an Etruscan city one must go to Volterra,
where so many of the treasures in the present building were found.

The Etruscans in their heyday were the most powerful people in
the world, but after the fifth century their supremacy gradually
disappeared, the Gauls on the one side and the Romans on the other
wearing them down. All our knowledge of them comes through the
spade. Excavations at Volterra and elsewhere have revealed some
thousands of inscriptions which have been in part deciphered; but
nothing has thrown so much light on this accomplished people as their
habit of providing the ashes of their dead with everything likely
to be needed for the next world, whose requirements fortunately so
exactly tallied with those of this that a complete system of domestic
civilization can be deduced. In arts and sciences they were most
enviably advanced, as a visit to the British Museum will show in
a moment. But it is to this Florentine Museum of Antiquities that
all students of Etruria must go. The garden contains a number of the
tombs themselves, rebuilt and refurnished exactly as they were found;
while on the ground floor is the amazing collection of articles which
the tombs yielded. The grave has preserved them for us, not quite
so perfectly as the volcanic dust of Vesuvius preserved the domestic
appliances of Pompeii, but very nearly so. Jewels, vessels, weapons,
ornaments--many of them of a beauty never since reproduced--are to
be seen in profusion, now gathered together for study only a short
distance from the districts in which centuries ago they were made
and used for actual life.

Upstairs we find relics of an older civilization still, the Egyptian,
and a few