Gaining an understanding of the funerary world is always difficult, as we are trying to understand ideas and beliefs developed by a long-gone society, and we only have archaeological materials and written sources.

The heads studied belong to a votive deposit of the Etruscan – Lazio1 – Campanian type. The votive offering and its meaning.

A vase recently acquired by the State for the National Archaeological Museum, an Apulian amphora with red figures by the Baltimore Painter, dated between 330 and 320 BC, allows us, through the reading of its images, to take a journey through the infernal and paradisiacal landscapes of the Surithalic imaginary. The iconographic and ideological programme of this vase, decorated with a naiskos scene, a scene with characters next to a funerary stele and a scene with Orpheus’ visit to the Underworld, has a clearly salvific message, offering the promise of a new, Edenic and immortal existence beyond death for the deceased.