ABSTRACT

As I begin this short route through the customs and ritual religious practices adopted and implemented by the Etruscans, I would like to echo the words with which Gregory Warden opened his contribution on “Remains of the Ritual at the Sanctuary of Poggio Colla,” asserting that “Ritual is a physical manifestation of belief, but a ritual is also an action,”1 and more specifically, as he emphasized in 20 11, it is a type of action by its nature “performative, repetitive and reproducible,”2 and for this reason permeated by physicality and temporality, although its broader meaning, i.e. the intersection between action and belief, cuts the bonds of time and space, managing to put the human element in connection with the divine. What remains of this action, the material outcome of the ritual, is indeed that “sacro detrito,” the “sacred debris,” on which the attention of scholars has been more and more frequently focused, aroused by the growing accumulation of data derived from surveys of excavations conducted in sacred spaces of the sanctuaries and necropoleis of the Etruscans.3