MONMOUTH, Ill. — Francesco Roncalli, a professor from the University of Naples in Italy, will deliver a lecture on Etruria at Monmouth College on Feb. 13 at 7:30 p.m. in the Whiteman-McMillan Highlander Room in the college’s Stockdale Center.

Entitled “The Stone, the Altar and the Threshold: Between Life and Afterlife in Etruria,” the lecture will focus on Roncalli’s research about the complexity of Etruscan views concerning afterlife and the underworld.

Until recently, most scholars thought that Etruscans were firm in the belief in a direct and joyful prosecution of earthly life and that it wasn’t until much later that they became acquainted with the Greek idea of a specific place for the dead (Hades).

However, Roncalli says, that opinion has proved much too simplified.

“Etruscan tombs and funeral monuments revisited show the local early development of the ideas of a journey, a dangerous passage, a fatal threshold for all humans, a happy destination for the elected,” he said.

Roncalli is a professor of Etruscology and Italic antiquities in Naples.

The event is sponsored by the Western Illinois Society of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) and is free and open to the public.