Italian archaeologists open 2,600-year-old tomb for first time, find wealthy family's treasures

Community leaders and archeologists in central Italy recently gathered in the municipality of Montalto di Castro for the opening of a tomb that dates back more than 2 1/2 millennia, the municipality announced in a social media post last week.

"Today ... we witnessed the opening of an ancient Etruscan tomb buried at the Osteria Necropolis in Vulci," the municipality of Montalto di Castro, which sits along the Mediterranean Sea about 100 miles northwest of Rome, wrote Oct. 27 on Facebook, calling the grand unveiling "a day of culture and history" in a translated statement.

Historians say the Etruscans built their civilization on a portion of the land that is now modern-day Italy, beginning as early as 900 B.C., and operated as a network of city-states not completely unlike the Roman Republic that came after it. The Etruscans dominated Italy until falling, as a result of the Roman-Etruscan wars, to the then-expanding Roman empire around the 4th century B.C.