Scarith of Scornello: The Twisted Forgery That Fooled Renaissance Europe

The Scarith of Scornello is one of history’s most audacious and bizarre forgeries. In 1634, a nineteen-year-old Italian boy buried strange little capsules in the Tuscan hillside near his family’s estate. He then “discovered” them. Scholars across Europe lost their minds debating whether they were real. The whole affair unraveled in spectacular fashion , and even then, the forger refused to admit defeat. This is the story of a teenage con artist, fake Etruscan prophecies, and a deception so clever it still raises questions nearly four centuries later.

The Scarith of Scornello: What Was Actually Found in That Hillside?

Picture the Tuscan hills near Volterra in 1634. A young nobleman named Curzio Inghirami is digging near his family’s estate at Scornello. He pulls something strange from the earth. It’s a small capsule. It’s made of wax, resin, pitch, hair, and mud. Inside are ancient-looking texts. He calls it a “scarith.”

Then he finds another. And another. Eventually, hundreds of these capsules emerge from the same hillside.

The texts inside were extraordinary. They claimed to be written around 62 BC by a man named Prosperus Fesulanus. He was supposedly a novice training to become an Etruscan priest , a haruspex. The writings covered everything. They described the prehistory of Italy. They told of the fall of Etruria to Rome. They contained prophecies. It was, if real, one of the greatest archaeological finds in history.

Curzio published his findings in 1637 in a book called Etruscarum antiquitatum fragmenta, printed in Frankfurt. The book included woodcuts and engravings of the capsules, the texts, and objects found nearby , including a lamp and a broken figurine. Europe’s scholarly community erupted.

The Etruscan civilization had long fascinated historians. These mysterious people predated Rome. Their language was still poorly understood. So the idea that a trove of Etruscan writings had surfaced in Tuscany was electrifying. Many scholars desperately wanted the scariths to be real.

The Scarith of Scornello Debate: How Did Anyone Believe Them?

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Here’s the creepy part. People actually defended these forgeries with serious arguments.

Supporters pointed out that Curzio was only nineteen when he made the discovery. Surely, they said, a teenager couldn’t craft such an elaborate deception. He also claimed he couldn’t even read or decipher the texts himself. That seemed suspicious for a forger. And when investigators returned to the hillside at Scornello, they found even more capsules buried in the ground. The earth itself seemed to confirm the discovery.

But the cracks appeared quickly for those willing to look.

The Etruscan language in the texts was written in the wrong direction. Real Etruscan ran right to left. These ran left to right. The texts were written on paper. Every classical Roman historian agreed that Etruscans wrote their sacred records on linen cloth. The best surviving example is the Liber Linteus, an Etruscan linen book preserved only because it was used to wrap an Egyptian mummy.

The Latin style was copied from the Psalms and the Breviary , medieval Christian texts. Small italic letters appeared throughout. Those weren’t used in the supposed era of the writings. Worst of all, the letter “i” had dots above it. That practice didn’t begin until the eleventh century AD , more than a thousand years after Prosperus Fesulanus supposedly wrote his prophecies.

Inghirami had been inspired by an earlier forger named Annio da Viterbo. That man had fabricated Etruscan antiquities a century earlier. Curzio was following a dark tradition of scholarly deception.

How the Scarith of Scornello Forgery Was Finally Exposed

The first public attack came in 1638. A scholar named Méric Casaubon published A Treatise of Use and Custome in London. He called out the scariths directly.

Then came the killing blow.

In 1640, a scholar named Leo Allatius published Animadversiones in antiquitatum etruscarum fragmenta in Paris. His work systematically dismantled every claim Inghirami had made. Allatius proved the texts were fake. His analysis was so thorough that it became an important early work in the field of codicology , the study of historical manuscripts.

You’d think that would be the end of it. It wasn’t.

Curzio Inghirami published a defiant response in 1645. He insisted everything was real. He argued against his critics for over a thousand pages. The man would not quit.

He died in Volterra in December 1655, still defending his fabrications. He was forty years old.

The story has one final, darkly comic twist. In 1985, thieves broke into the Palazzo Inghirami in Volterra. They stole the scariths. They thought they were stealing priceless authentic documents. They had actually stolen elaborate fakes. The thieves went to considerable effort to steal something a seventeenth-century teenager had cooked up in his backyard.

The Strange Legacy of a Teenage Forger

Here’s what makes this story genuinely strange. Despite being a complete fraud, the scariths actually mattered.

Curzio’s forgeries forced European scholars to pay serious attention to Etruscan civilization. The debate around the capsules pushed academics to study Etruscan language, culture, and history more carefully. In a twisted way, a teenage liar helped build the foundations of Etruscan archaeology.

Isaac D’Israeli wrote about the affair in his 1835 Curiosities of Literature, noting the strange mix of audacity and erudition in Inghirami’s deception. Even critics admitted the forgeries were impressively crafted.

Was Curzio a cynical con artist? Or was he a passionate young man who believed Etruscan history deserved more attention , and took extreme measures to generate it? We’ll never know for certain. He took his secrets to his grave.

What we do know is this: the Scarith of Scornello fooled some of Europe’s greatest minds for years. They came from the hands of a teenager with a bucket of wax, some resin, and an extraordinary nerve. The hillside at Scornello gave up its fake secrets willingly. And the scholars who wanted to believe never quite forgave themselves for falling for it.

Some hoaxes expose human gullibility. This one exposed something stranger , our desperate hunger to reach back through time and touch a lost civilization.