Terracotta Face of Goddess Uni Found at Pyrgi, Italy

Students digging at an Etruscan sanctuary on Italy’s coast this year uncovered a small piece of terracotta that put them face to face, almost literally, with the goddess the site was built to honor.

A Fragment From Temple B

The find comes from Pyrgi, an ancient sanctuary near modern Santa Severa that once served as a port for the powerful Etruscan city of Caere, today’s Cerveteri. Archaeologists and students from Sapienza University of Rome, who resumed excavation there this year, recovered the piece in the area of Temple B. Sapienza announced the discovery simply: Today, at Pyrgi, Uni returned to look at us. The object is a fragment of an antefix, a decorative element that lined the edges of tiled roofs in Greek, Etruscan, and Roman buildings, often carrying human faces or divine imagery. Female-headed antefixes were already known from Temple B, so this new piece adds to an existing body of architectural decoration rather than representing the first image of Uni found at the site.

The Goddess Named in Gold

Temple B was built toward the end of the sixth century BC and dedicated to Uni, one of the most important deities in Etruscan religion, later closely associated with the Roman Juno and Greek Hera. The connection between the building and the goddess rests on unusually solid evidence: three thin gold tablets discovered at Pyrgi in 1964, two inscribed in Etruscan and one in Phoenician, together forming one of the most significant bilingual records to survive from the ancient Mediterranean. The inscriptions record a dedication by Thefarie Velianas, ruler of Caere, and date Temple B to around 510 BC. The originals are kept at the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia in Rome.

Uni, Astarte, and a Shared Sanctuary

At Pyrgi, Uni took on an unusually international role. The sanctuary’s Phoenician inscription identifies her directly with Astarte, a goddess widely worshipped across Phoenician and wider Mediterranean religious networks. That equivalence illustrates how closely Etruscans, Phoenicians, and other Mediterranean communities interacted during the Archaic period, treating their deities as counterparts of one another rather than as entirely separate figures.

Part of a Much Larger Picture

Excavations at Pyrgi led by Sapienza have continued for more than 60 years, uncovering temples, sacred buildings, and extensive architectural terracottas that established the site as a key location for understanding both Etruscan religion and Mediterranean cultural exchange. The newly recovered face is a modest object on its own, but it comes from the exact temple whose ancient inscriptions preserve the name of the goddess it depicts, giving it an unusually precise archaeological context more than 2,500 years after Uni was first worshipped there.

Sources

This report draws on Sapienza University of Rome’s own announcement of the discovery at Pyrgi.