Dead Secret

The warm, shallow waters of the Adriatic off smart Lido Beach lapped up with unconcern, last week, a profound secret. Locked in the brain of an elderly gentleman who died of a heart attack while in swimming, the secret had to do with the dark, strange, warlike people, apparently neither Semitic nor Aryan, who, before Rome was founded, lived on the fertile land between the Tiber and the Alps. The modern world calls them Etrurians. They made strong bronze armour, neat wooden-soled shoes; jewelry, pottery and precious plate of a delicacy which has excited the curious admiration of artisans ever since. They worshipped strange gods in weird cypress groves and spoke a tongue which no one, except perhaps the scholar who drowned last week, has ever satisfactorily deciphered.

The drowned man was Professor Alfredo Trombetti, 63. Once a barber's apprentice, he studied languages, won a scholarship at the University of Bologna, later a Government money grant to concentrate on the Etruscan mystery. He announced last April that soon he would reveal startling findings, but not before they were complete. Scholars waited anxiously to hear whether he had left any notes on his life work, and whether the notes, if any, were decipherable.