Portonaccio

The site

The sanctuary complex was built in the 7th century BC in a cutting on the side of the hill over which the city wall of Veii towered. One of the richest sources of Etruscan artifacts (pottery and other objects inscribed in Etruscan and terra cotta statuary and other decorative elements), it contained two main structures, one a sanctuary dedicated to the goddess Menerva (Etruscan spelling) and the other a temple that had statues of Turms, Hercle, Apollo (the Apollo of Veii) and Leto on the roof, which has come to be regarded as a temple of Apollo. Next to the temple of Apollo was a rectangular pool and a well provided water. The site has been left wooded, as it was in ancient times, when surrounded by a sacred grove and a wall.

The roof of the temple of Apollo has been restored on one side.

The site was excavated in modern times by Massimo Pallottino in the 1940s and published decades later by the first and second generation of his students.

The Portonaccio Sanctuary of Minerva was the first Tuscan–type, i.e., Etruscan, temple erected in Etruria (about 510 BCE). The reconstruction proposed for it in 1993 by Giovanni Colonna together with Germano Foglia, presents a square 60 feet (18 m) construction on a low podium (about 1.8 metres, considering the 29 cm foundation) and divided into a pronaos with two columns making up the facade between entrances, 24 feet (7.3 m) deep and a group in the back made up of three 30 feet (9.1 m) deep adjacent cells. The 21-foot (6.4 m) columns were made of stuccoed tuff as were the walls, which inside the pronaos were decorated with various paintings on clay panels. The roof was in wood covered with polychrome terracotta. The terracotta was placed through a refined system of syllabic abbreviations and they were integrated with bronze inserts and a generous profusion of plastic inserts, mostly modelled by hand, among which a splendid series of grand antefixes (joint coverings) with the heads of Gorgons, maenads and satyrs. …