America hasn’t had a major Etruscan exhibition since 2009, when Dallas’s Meadows Museum hosted “New Light on the Etruscans.” That changes in May 2026, when San Francisco’s Legion of Honor museum unveils “The Etruscans: From the Heart of Ancient Italy,” a sprawling show of 180 Etruscan antiquities from 30 international museums—many of which have never been seen in the United States.
The exhibition will culminate 10 years of research and elucidate how this enigmatic Italian civilization shaped the Roman culture immediately after theirs. The Etruscans are one of Europe’s lesser-known entities. Rome is partly to blame. The Etruscans dominated central Italy throughout the 1st millennium B.C.E., until the formidably unified Romans conquered their comparatively isolated cities one by one throughout the 2nd and 1st centuries B.C.E.—claiming numerous Etruscan innovations as their own along the way.
