Ancient Capena is situated about 40 km north of Rome. Although militarily allied to Etruscan Veii and with a material culture closely similar to that of south Etruria, Capena — like its northern neighbour Falerii — spoke an Italic language (Faliscan). When Rome was consolidating its position in the Tiber valley, it first of all destroyed the powerful stronghold of Veii leaving Capena and Falerii exposed. The Romans’ contest against these two towns was long and unequal, but, although we hear virtually nothing of Capena in ancient literature after Falerii was captured in 241 b.c., there was occupation in the Roman period, as its principal monument, the Castellaccio ruin, attests. Concerning its earlier history, Capena’s stone defensive walls may originate in the fifth century b.c., and there is little settlement evidence extending back further than the eighth century.

The area today is in deep countryside and little visited except by the determined. Surrounding the hilltop settlement site and the adjacent long-dried-up lake (Lago Vecchio) there are extensive necropolises which are especially rich in material of the mid-seventh to mid-sixth centuries (the ‘Orientalising’ and early Archaic periods). One of these cemeteries, and one of the closest to the town site, is the subject of this book. Pl. IV shows a detailed plan of the relevant excavation areas, while pl. I offers a useful wider map of the whole area and the various burial grounds. Here it should be pointed out that the publication of the Monte Cornazzano necropolis needs to be taken together with that of the larger cemetery of San Martino to the north of the settlement (M. Gilda Benedettini and A. Mura Sommella, La necropoli di San Martino in età orientalizzante, published earlier in Monumenti Antichi 77 (2018)), to which reference is frequently made. The two publications will be referred to here as Capena 1 and 2 (the current book). They have much in common: the aims of both are similar, they are of similar format and deal with similar material, and the author teams for both overlap considerably.

A major problem which the authors had to overcome was the timespan between the original excavations in the very early twentieth century and the production of this final publication. It required much piecing together of lacunose tomb-groups that had been disrupted during successive removals into various storage depots, as well as close attention to relevant giornali di scavo. In the 1970s much of the material was taken to the storerooms of the antiquarium at Lucus Feroniae. Of the tomb-groups presented and analysed about one fifth are from trench tombs (fosse), the rest from chamber tombs.

Pottery forms the bulk of the material, and many of the tomb-groups seem to consist of dining or drinking ‘sets’. At Capena these are dominated by a large impasto stand or holmos supporting a handleless bowl or olla for wine or other festive drink. Cups, stemmed bowls and plates may complete the service. The pottery fabrics are various: bucchero (not common), brown impasto, painted wares (both red-on-white, and, less frequent, white-on-red); also impasto with excised (ad incavo) decoration. More common — and a speciality of the region — is impasto with incised decoration which encompasses both floral and figure scenes; in many ways it is the most interesting aspect of the whole material and is rightly given due attention. Essentially this is an ‘animal style’: of horses, lions, indeterminate felines, and with varieties of ‘chimaeras’ combining various quadrupeds and serpents; there is also one rather curious human figure, a rider, with triangular body and very odd limb proportions (pl. 57). In general terms a similar animal style is found also at Falerii as well as across the Tiber at Poggio Sommavilla in the Sabine area. Future studies will some day draw out the history of this whole output and the interplays between these centres, but such work will demand full attention to line drawings drawn at a consistent scale. The drawings of the Capena 2 volume are good but a few scenes are simply left to be deciphered from the b/w photos.

From the San Martino material, so far only two ‘masters’ had previously been isolated (masters rather than painters as this is an incising rather than a painting technique): the San Martino Master and the Leg-in-Mouth Master. The authors of Capena 1 and 2 express some doubt as to whether much further progress can be made in defining individuals in this way (e.g. Capena 1, 564–5), for the reason that some artists seem to borrow freely from the wider output of their own workshops. However, this kind of research at a granular level does help to plot relationships between individuals and workshops not only within the community but also with neighbouring centres, and, given that the friezes are executed not by AI but by actual craftsmen, more personalities will no doubt be identified in due course. Meanwhile Capena 1 and 2 have accomplished commendable groundwork in distinguishing the principal workshops responsible for this kind of material emanating from the two necropolises concerned. For the future, however distant, prospects are good as there is much more material from old excavations (for example from the Le Macchie and Le Saliere necropolises), previously only partially published and illustrated, which can be taken into consideration to form a more complete picture.