The first marriage in Tuscan history was not between a man and a woman but between a vine and a tree. Before the Etruscans cleared these hills, they were dense with oakwood, through which wild grape vines climbed naturally toward the canopy, wedded to the forest in which they grew. The Etruscans formalized that marriage. Vines were trained up living maples, elms, and poplars. Grapes were cut from ladders or with long sickles. Later Italians called it the vite maritata—the married vine.

The Etruscans remain one of antiquity’s great mysteries. Herodotus said the Tyrrhenians, as the Greeks called them, were Lydian immigrants displaced by famine, while Dionysius of Halicarnassus insisted they were native to Italy. One thing we know is that their wine preceded the Roman republic: Etruscan cork-stoppered amphorae have been dated to 600 B.C., when Rome was still ruled by kings. Plutarch, in his Life of Camillus, says that the wine of Italy was first introduced to the Gauls by Arruns, a Tuscan: “they admired the drink so much, and were all so beside themselves with the novel pleasure which it gave, that they seized their arms, took along their families, and made off to the Alps, in quest of the land which produced such fruit.”

The Greek historian Theopompus found it scandalous that Etruscan women drank openly beside men at banquet: “They pledge