Few are the informations that the ancient sources (Cicero, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Livy, Strabo, etc.) handed down to us about the history of Tarquinia, but those still describe the city as one of the most important of all Etruria.
Tarconte, son of the hero Tirreno, the king of Lydia who led the Tyrrhenians (the Etruscans) in Italy, founded the city and gave it its name. In Tarquinia would also have appeared the divine child Tages, who taught the Etruscans the fundamentals of haruspicy, namely the divination practice obtained through the inspection of sacrificed animal entrails for which the Etruscan priests were famous for centuries. At Tarquinia was also set the origin of the Tarquin dynasty, the Etruscan kings who reigned in Rome between the late 7th and the 6th centuries BC.

The Archaeological Museum of Tarquinia is housed in the Vitelleschi beautiful palace, built between 1436 and 1439 by Cardinal Giovanni Vitelleschi, in the time of Pope Eugene IV.
The palace, one of the most important monuments of the early Renaissance in Lazio, shows the slow transition from the Gothic to the Renaissance language that only in the first half of the 15th century was spreading in peripheral centres.