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Between the end of the 6th and the beginning of the 5th century B.C., in the plain between the southern slopes of Mount Calvana, the Bisenzio River and the Marinella stream, the archaic Etruscan settlement of Gonfienti (PO) was planned and built with an orthogonal urban layout. Since the late 1990s, archaeological investigations have uncovered parts of the settlement over an area covering nearly 20 hectares. With a total area of about 1490 m2, in terms of state of preservation and quantity of finds, Building 1 of Lot 14, an atrium house found still partly sealed by the collapse of the roof structures, stands out; this has made possible to identify with good approximation the intended use of most of the rooms, based on the planimetric layout and the materials recovered inside (late 6th-mid 5th century BC). Here, the focus is on the analysis of the vascular set, from the banquet room, the largest in the house (about 74 m2), located in the northwestern part of the building. The typology of the finds found below the collapse of the roof confirms, as a whole, the identification of the room as triclinium: basins on high feet made of bucchero and impasto (similar in function to the krater), attingitoi, attic ceramics (among which a kylix attributed to Douris stands out) and depurated tableware. Alongside emblematic aspects related to the ritual sphere, the presence of /impasto forms explicitly dedicated to food preparation and preservation invites to consider the practical aspects of the banquet as well. About 150 meters west of Building 1, research undertaken since 2020 by the Chair of Etruscology at the University of Florence has uncovered the structures of another large residential building, also overlooking the large glareata road that crosses the entire Lot 14. The stratigraphic investigations revealed several construction phases distributed between the 6th and the end of the 5th century BC. In particular, corresponding to the last phase, the S-E sector of the building shows an elevation of the foundation masonry and various reconstructions, mainly concentrated in room/compartment A and the fauces. Compartment A is occupied for half of the surface by a large fire area surrounded by pebbles and intended for cooking food. The large hearth appears to be unique in residential construction at Gonfienti and, more generally, finds few comparisons in the rest of Etruria. The abandonment of the remaining part of the building and the complete reorganization of the room, in addition to the various artifacts recovered during the excavation, allow to formulate some hypotheses about the functionality of the room, which seems to have been released from the exclusively private sphere. Despite the many open questions regarding the type of use of the building and, more generally, of the city, this seems to confirm the profound transformations of Gonfienti at a time before its final abandonment, which likely occurred at the end of the fifth century BC.
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