For the residents of an ancient Etruscan settlement, any time the Romans came to town, it could only mean bad news. That’s because, starting in the fourth century BCE, the Romans began a relentless campaign to overtake Etruscan towns, one by one.

It was a slow and, at times, incredibly brutal process. The result was that by the first century BCE, the Etruscan civilization essentially had been Romanized. But in some Etruscan towns, things turned out differently.