The past may be or seem like a foreign land. At least until someone tries to crack its codes. The rediscovery of the Etruscans in Campania constitutes in this sense an emblematic case, made up of conquests, defeats, forgetting and denial or repression and populated, like a fairy tale, by ghosts and mirages. Yet the literary testimonies offered a unique picture in this regard, albeit fragmentary, stratified and not easy to recompose, given the mixture of cultures that characterized the region from its origins, making it hard to decipher.

The volume offers an unprecedented overview of almost four centuries, during which archaeology definitively established itself as a historical science and finally succeeded in solving the enigma, restoring to the Etruscans of Campania the reality that some critics had denied them. In the background looms the history of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples, the protagonist and often also the victim of this complex process of regaining an important fragment of our past.