The Fanum Voltumnae was the principal federal sanctuary of the Etruscans, sacred to the deity whom Latin sources call Voltumna. According to Livy, representatives of the twelve peoples of the Etruscan League gathered there periodically to deliberate on matters of common concern and to celebrate religious ceremonies and solemn games.. The Latin word fanum does not denote a single temple but a consecrated precinct as a whole, embracing buildings and spaces with distinct functions., citing Suetonius, Divus Iulius, 54.
No ancient author records where the sanctuary stood, presumably because its location was common knowledge.; . Excavations conducted since 2000 at Campo della Fiera, on the plain below the cliff of Orvieto (Etruscan Velzna, Roman Volsinii), under the direction of Simonetta Stopponi, have uncovered a vast sanctuary complex which current scholarship largely identifies with the Fanum Voltumnae.; ; ; ; .
What became of the sanctuary after the Roman conquest of Velzna (264 BC) remains disputed: some scholars argue for unbroken cult continuity on the site into late antiquity, while others posit a hiatus, or the transfer of the federal functions to the refounded Volsinii Novi (Bolsena).; ; .
The deity The Latin theonym Voltumna renders an Etruscan form that is not directly attested and is reconstructed as *Velthum(e)na; the variant Veltune labels a bearded male figure holding a spear on the well-known engraved mirror from Tuscania depicting a scene of haruspicy.. Varro calls the god deus Etruriae princeps,Varro, De lingua latina, 5.46. a phrase whose meaning is debated: while part of the scholarship reads it as a statement of pre-eminence within the Etruscan pantheon, others, such as Gérard Capdeville, take it to mean the first Etruscan god brought to Rome, and Francesco Marcattili likewise rules out a hierarchical sense.; .
That the deity was male is now settled in scholarship: the confusion over gender, already present in antiquity and echoed by some modern critics, is explained by the Latin reception of Etruscan names ending in -na, which could be taken as either masculine or feminine.. The prevailing view, upheld among others by Pettazzoni, Pfiffig, Roncalli and Cristofani, sees in Velthumna an epithet of Tinia, the supreme Etruscan god, worshipped in the territory of Volsinii in his chthonic aspect; Capdeville instead regards Tinia and Voltumna as two distinct deities.; ; , as cited by Tamburini.
Latin sources equate Voltumna with the Roman god Vertumnus, whose ancient statue stood in the vicus Tuscus at Rome. In Giorgio Ferri's reconstruction, however, the two cults had separate origins: Vortumnus would be a Latin deity, linked to the verb vertere and epigraphically unattested in Etruria, whose perceived Etruscan character derived from the statue's position in Rome's Etruscan quarter; the identification with Voltumna would have crystallised on the occasion of the probable, though not certain, evocatio performed by the consul Marcus Fulvius Flaccus at the fall of Velzna.. To the summoned god Flaccus dedicated a temple on the Aventine, whose dies natalis fell on the Ides of August (13 August), the same day as that of the Aventine temple of Diana: a coincidence linking the tutelary deities of the two great leagues of central Italy, the Etruscan and the Latin.; .
Ancient sources Livy names the fanum Voltumnae explicitly in five passages (4.23.5; 4.25.7; 4.61.2; 5.17.6; 6.2.2), concerning events between 434 and 389 BC.; . For the chronology of the individual passages: . The councils he records were convened above all in connection with the conflict between Rome and Veii: the other Etruscan cities repeatedly debated the Veientine appeals for help without ever agreeing on a common course of action.. Further passages of Livy (2.44.8; 7.21.9) and of Dionysius of Halicarnassus (3.59.4; 9.1.2; 9.18.2–4) mention Etruscan councils without naming the sanctuary; the apparently irregular spacing of the recorded meetings has suggested that they did not follow a fixed calendar..
A passage of Livy referring to 403 BC (5.1) reports that at the sanctuary the twelve peoples annually elected a sacerdos by vote, and that solemn games were held there whose interruption was deemed sacrilege (sollemnia ludorum quos intermitti nefas est): the king of Veii, angered at losing the election, withdrew the performers from the games and thereby drew the hostility of the other peoples upon his city.. Fairs and markets accompanied the gatherings, as Livy's mention of mercatores implies.Livy, 4.24.2 and 6.2.2; . On the emporic character of the sanctuary: . In the Archaic period the twelve lucumones may have chosen one of their number as primus inter pares; in the imperial age the honorific title praetor Etruriae XV populorum, Etruscan zilaθ meχl rasnal, is attested..
Other sources tie the sanctuary and its god to Volsinii: Propertius attests the Volsinian origin of Vertumnus;Propertius, 4.2.3–4; . Pliny the Elder, drawing on Metrodorus of Scepsis, states that the Roman conquest of the city yielded a booty of two thousand bronze statues, a figure pointing to the wealth of a great cult place;Pliny, Naturalis historia, 34.34; ; . Festus records that in the god's Aventine temple Fulvius Flaccus had himself portrayed in the toga picta of a triumphator.Festus, 228 L; . Valerius Maximus describes Volsinii as wealthy, well ordered in customs and laws, the "caput Etruriae".Valerius Maximus, 9.1, ext. 2; .
The Rescript of Spello The so-called Rescript of Spello (CIL XI 5265), a stone copy of a document issued by the chancery of Constantine between AD 333 and 337 and found in 1733 near the temple area of Villa Fidelia, released the Umbrians, represented by the inhabitants of Hispellum, from the obligation of travelling every year to Volsinii to celebrate, together with the Etruscans and "according to ancient custom", theatrical and gladiatorial games.; . The document shows that the festivals which had replaced the Etruscan councils were still alive in late antiquity, having become under Diocletian the focus of the imperial cult of the province of Tuscia et Umbria, entrusted to the coronatus Tusciae et Umbriae.. Scholars disagree over whether the Volsinii of the rescript is the Roman town at Bolsena or the sanctuary area below Orvieto (see below).
History of research The question of the sanctuary's location arose in the Renaissance. In the fifteenth century the Dominican friar Annio da Viterbo placed it at Viterbo, within the web of learned forgeries through which he sought to endow his home town with an illustrious past.. On Annio: . In the nineteenth century George Dennis proposed first the hill of Montefiascone and later Viterbo; other suggestions ranged from Civita Castellana, the Voltone and Monte Becco near Farnese, the very cliff of Orvieto and Tarquinia, to the unidentified centres of Oenarea and Trossulum.; . According to Pietro Tamburini, these searches rested on a basic misunderstanding: fanum was read as "temple" and therefore sought on a commanding height, whereas a sanctuary meant to host councils, games, contests and fairs required broad level ground, on the model of the panhellenic sanctuary of Olympia.
In 1935 the Orvietan scholar Geralberto Buccolini, re-examining the reports of nineteenth-century digs in the valley south-west of the cliff, which had brought to light the walls of monumental buildings and architectural terracottas of high quality, some of which soon ended up in Berlin, proposed to locate the fanum in the "Giardino della Regina" area within the broader Campo della Fiera.; . A first confirmation came by chance in 1987, when the trench dug for Orvieto's new aqueduct produced large amounts of Etruscan building material together with Etruscan, Greek and eastern pottery; a subsequent trial excavation by the Archaeological Superintendency for Umbria identified a Roman road flanked by earlier buildings on a different alignment.; .
Systematic excavation began in the summer of 2000 under the University of Macerata, directed by Simonetta Stopponi; in 2008 the concession passed to the University of Perugia, joined the following year by the University of Foggia, with the scientific direction unchanged.; . The campaigns continue on an annual basis..
The sanctuary The sanctuary extends over more than three hectares, of which upwards of 30,000 square metres have been investigated in depth.; . After sporadic traces of Villanovan frequentation, the material record becomes substantial shortly before the middle of the sixth century BC, with fragments of first-phase architectural terracottas and Greek pottery; Attic imports grow markedly in the third quarter of the century..
Two paved roads cross the site: one, laid out around the middle of the third century BC, five metres wide and rutted by cart traffic, linked Orvieto to Bolsena; the other, between seven and nine metres wide, short and straight, is interpreted as the sanctuary's sacred way.; . The central sector is occupied by a sacred enclosure, rebuilt several times between the Republican and imperial periods and marked by two wells: within it stand the small temple A, facing east and fronted by altars of tuff and trachyte, a monumental trachyte donarium, a stone thesaurus for coin offerings, and a quadrangular structure that contained an inscribed base.; ; . A second, large temple building (temple B), aligned with the sacred way and set on rising ground with a commanding view, is regarded by some scholars as the sanctuary's main temple, perhaps that of Voltumna; a third Archaic building (temple C) stood along the eastern side of the sacred way.; .
The architectural terracottas recovered, often with well-preserved polychromy, span the late sixth to the early third century BC; the find of a mould of Classical date shows that part of the decoration was produced locally for the sanctuary.; . The votive material includes Attic black- and red-figure pottery, bronzes, female votive heads and coins of Umbrian, Greek and Siculo-Punic mints, evidence of a catchment reaching beyond Etruria..
Inscriptions The most significant epigraphic find is the trachyte base for a bronze statue, bearing the longest Archaic inscription so far known from Orvieto, cut on two sides: kanuta larecenas lautenitha aranthia pinies puia turuce / tluschval marvethul faliathere. In Stopponi's reading the text records the offering made by Kanuta, a freedwoman of the Larecena family and wife of Aranth Pinie, to the female deities Tluschva of the abode in the "heavenly place" (faliathere); Giovanni Colonna instead takes the divine group as male and construes the word marvethul differently.; ; , as cited by Tamburini. The dedication by a freedwoman has been connected with a competence of the sanctuary in the sphere of manumission..
A fragmentary grey bucchero bowl carries the word apas ("of the father") scratched on its inner base: Colonna recognises in it a dedication to Voltumna as father of the gods, whereas Stopponi prefers to refer the term to Dionysus.; , as cited by Tamburini; . A black-gloss plate from a fountain by temple B bears the digraph ve, which Stopponi has tentatively proposed to expand as an abbreviation of Veltune.; . No inscription naming the titular deity in full has yet come to light.
Cults