Tinia sits at the centre of what made Etruscan religion famous in antiquity: the reading of the sky. The Etruscans divided the heavens into sixteen regions, each the seat of particular gods, and the direction from which a lightning bolt came, and the quarter it struck, told a trained priest which god had sent it and what it meant. This fulgural doctrine placed Tinia's thunderbolts on a graded scale: the first kind he could hurl on his own authority, but heavier bolts required the assent of other, veiled gods, the dii involuti, so that even the king of heaven acted within a council. The same divided cosmos is mapped onto the famous bronze Piacenza Liver, a model sheep's liver marked with the gods' regions used to train the haruspex.
Etruscan religion was, above all, a technology of interpreting divine signs, and Tinia's sky was its master text. The Piacenza Liver itself has a documented modern history distinct from its ancient one: the bronze model was found only in 1877 near Gossolengo, in the countryside outside the city of Piacenza, and is now kept in the city's Museo Civico, so that this single small object, barely the size of a real liver, has had to carry almost the whole weight of modern reconstruction of how the Etruscan sixteen-fold sky was actually mapped onto a divinatory tool.