NEAR MONTALCINO, ITALY, Friday, March 25, 2011 — It was another day of adventures for Will, who yesterday declared at breakfast he wanted to “Seize the day and shake it around.”

We started by leaving our newly beloved Rome with a great cab ride to the airport — the driver inadvertently drove us past many of the main sites — the Piazza Venezia with its Victor Emmanuel Monument and the Capitoline Hill, the Jewish Ghetto and its Augustan-era Theatre of Marcellus, the Palatine Hill with its ancient crumbling vaults towering over the now barren Circus Maximus, a chunk of the 4th century BC wall built after the barbarians sacked the city, even an Augustan-era tomb in the shape of a pyramid (when things from the recently conquered Egypt were all the rage.)

We then rented a car at the airport, and Capt. Rick bravely seized the controls. We had an uneventful drive up to the ancient Etruscan necropolis at Cerveteri, about 20 minutes north of Rome. The necropolis is essentially a city of the dead, a large area filled with tombs built by the Etruscans starting in about the 9th century BC through at least the 6th century BC (rough dates, I’m riffing). The weather was gorgeous, birds twittering, butterflies flitting, the whole bit, making what is essentially an ancient cemetery quite lovely. Also, much to Will’s delight, we had the place to ourselves. He declared it was even better than Pompeii, and it was very amazing. The tombs were either carved into the tufa stone, or carved and then built up with blocks of stone topped by earth. Vegetation covered the tops of the mostly circular tombs, which had doorways reminiscent of the tombs in Bronze Age Greece.

Will loved going into the tombs, which were carved to be shaped like the homes of the living. In one tomb, there were two carved columns topped by Corinthian capitals, special rooms for the dead with platforms that looked like beds. Because I had dragged Rick and Will to the Etruscan museum yesterday, where we saw the splendor of the imported Greek pottery, Etruscan bronze work, jewelry etc. found in these very graves, it was not hard to visualize the care and love and respect that people took when preparing family members for the hereafter. Many of the tombs were flooded, which made Will sad for the people who were buried there.

We then motored north to Tuscany, where we have settled into a 200-plus-year-old building-turned-hotel on the grounds of a hilltop castle near Montalcino. We are getting settled, going to have dinner here tonight, and set to explore southern Tuscany, including Siena, over the weekend.