CORTONA
Tuscany, Italy.
Probably a member
of the Etruscan League and identical with Vergil's Gorythus (after its legendary founder and father of Dardanus of Troy:
Aen. 3.170; 7.209), Cortona's earliest remains date to the 7th c. B.C. After it was absorbed by
Rome in the 4th c., it rarely appears in the sources.
Important among the 7th-6th c. remains are a group
of funerary tumuli (meloni) near the town. The melone
di Camucia contained gold and bronze objects and, besides imported Greek pottery, local impasto, bucchero,
and painted ware from the 7th-6th c. A stone funerary
bed with weeping women in low relief, now in Florence,
was found inside. The 6th c. meloni del Sodo I and II
and the 4th c. so-called tumulus of Pythagoras (who
never resided here but at Kroton) are dated by their
respective vault construction. All are built of great blocks.
The 5th c. Etruscan wall, made of roughly squared
blocks of local stone, is still visible, especially near Porta
Colonia. Its double gate is later. There is a Roman reservoir 18 m square.
The Museo dell'Accademia Etrusca houses Greek and
Roman items with a fine Etruscan collection. A sarcophagus depicting lapiths and centaurs is in the Duomo of
S. Maria.
About 16 km to the S is Lake Trasimene. Today the
malpasso, the defile hemmed in by cliffs, scene of Hannibal's entrapment of the Romans in 217 B.C., lies 1.2 km
from the shrunken NE shore line; the old shore line is
still visible from the air. To the E near Tuoro are ditches
in which the dead were cremated.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A. Neppi Modona,
Cortona etrusca e
romana (1925)
I with bibliography; L. Pernier,
MonAnt
30 (1925); A. Minto,
NSc (1929); E. Franchini, “Il
melone di Camucia,”
StEtr 20 (1948-49); A. Donati,
“Epigrafia Cortonese,”
Estratto da Annuario 13 (1965-67); H. H. Scullard,
The Etruscan Cities and Rome
(1967).
D. C. SCAVONE
