Grave Robber Creates an Etruscan Theme Park

He was born in this land of Etruscan tombs and grew up raiding graves. Now the man who irritated archeologists for decades has recreated the world of the ancients in a kind of Disneyland of the dead.

By all accounts, Omero Bordo, 54, is a strange character.

For years he earned his living as a tombarolo, or grave robber. His target was Tarquinia’s city of the dead, a sprawling necropolis of underground chambers with painted murals and exquisitely crafted jewelry and pottery, the main legacy of Italy’s most sophisticated civilization before the Romans.

Bordo also did two years in prison for counterfeiting--creating for sale Etruscan artifacts so realistic that he claims court experts couldn’t tell the difference between fake and authentic.

Now he has a new labor. He has created stunningly realistic copies of seven of the most famous painted Etruscan tombs so far discovered, including the Tomb of the Panther, which he found in 1972 and pointed out to archeologists.

“Etruscopolis,” as Bordo has named his creation, was opened on a limited basis this summer. After closing for fall and winter so the exhibits can be finished, the attraction is supposed to open for good next spring as a major tourist stop in Tarquinia, a town about a 90-minute drive north of Rome.

The re-created burial chambers were carved out of an 18,000-square-yard underground quarry where the ancient Etruscans cut the soft limestone for their buildings and where, until a few years ago, a mushroom farm flourished.

“We have the necropolis, the [National] Museum, and now this ‘other’ museum. You don’t even know how to define it,” says Alberto Renzi of Tarquinia’s tourist board.

The promotional board sponsored this summer’s once-a-week opening for visitors to Etruscopolis, so admission was free. Bordo says he hasn’t figured out how much to charge when the attraction reopens, or how long the tours will take.

“It’ll be move ‘em in, move ‘em out,” says Bordo, who is eager to quickly recoup the $5 million he says “Etruscopolis” will cost him.

The details are painstaking. The wall paintings, done by Bordo, use the same rust red, sea green and creamy beige shades that the Etruscans chose to decorate what they believed were the antechambers to the afterlife.

In his version of the Tomb of the Panther, Bordo holds his hand over the center of one design of a panther’s head and asks a visitor, “Doesn’t it look like two horses kissing?”

There’s also the Fishing Tomb, where playful dolphins leap out of a sea painted on the wall, and the Tomb of the Bulls, with a drawing of a bull pointing its horns menacingly at a couple of men engaging in sex.

Only a few of the 50 real painted tombs that have been discovered can be seen by the public, and usually only one or two of them are open on any given day. Tourists are taken down by guides from the state’s superintendency of archeology, and viewing time is kept to a few minutes to limit damage to the frescoes from light and the visitors’ breath.

“Etruscopolis for the man in the street is an educational exhibit,” Bordo says.

Asked about the authenticity of the presentation of the tombs, he gets testy.

“Who’s the expert? I’m the expert. I lived 20 years underground with the ancients,” he says.

Archeologists shudder when Italian newspapers write that, on a twist of the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” philosophy, the state asked Bordo to be a consultant.

“We don’t need the consultancy of someone with a fifth-grade education,” snaps Maria Gabriella Scapaticci, directing state archeologist for southern Etruria, a zone that includes Etruscan country north of Rome.

While denying Bordo is on the payroll, she does say he “might have pointed out some tombs” and concedes he told archeologists about the Tomb of the Panther.

But Scapaticci contends that Bordo gave them the tip to ingratiate himself with authorities “after feeding himself for years by robbing” graves.

Under a 1939 law, anyone who finds an ancient object in the ground is supposed to turn it over to the state. But plundering graves for vases, figurines and other artifacts is driven by a lucrative black market, robbing scientists of the evidence they need to better document Etruscan culture.

About 6,300 graves have been excavated in Tarquinia alone, Scapaticci says, but archeologists don’t have the money to dig out many others with the care that preserving the finds requires.

And there aren’t enough resources to protect all the tombs--discovered or not--from tombaroli who creep in at night to dig in the necropolis, which fills a bare ridge 3 miles long and half a mile wide.

“We could use helicopters at night,” Scapaticci says with a sigh. “The police do what they can. But the area is so vast, if the tombaroli see them patrolling at night at one end, they just go over to the other end.”