The Capitoline She-wolf represents the ancient origins of Rome.

So what better place to store them than in the oldest museum in the world, the Capitoline Museums?

The two small boys suckling at the wolf’s teats are Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, and the she-wolf is the mother of the city. This is a foundation myth that dates back to the fourth century. The story goes that Romulus and Remus were twins, sons of Rhea Silvia and the god of war, Mars. This isn’t a Vincent-and-Theo tale of brotherly love. It ends with one brother being killed and the other finding a new city, and it’s a long and hard road before they get there.

The story is a tragedy filled with family issues. Rhea’s uncle, Amulius, forced her into a vow of chastity, for fear that her descendants would seek revenge on him and take the power he had stolen from his own brother. The vow didn’t stop Mars from raping her. Once Rhea fell pregnant, Amulius’s concern for his own safety became real, and so he sent his servants to drown the twins. It was on that day that he learned the old saying, “If you want to get the job done right, do it yourself.” His servants, afraid of getting too close to the rising Tiber River, abandoned Romulus and Remus on the shores and assumed nature would take its course. Of course, this didn’t happen. They washed up near the Palatine Hill and were found by a mama wolf who had recently lost her own cubs.

What’s not included in this statue is the woodpecker that Mars sent to help care for his sons. After being nursed by the wolf, Faustulus, our story’s most humble shepherd, cared for the boys until adulthood, when they came back for Amulius in the greatest revenge story ever told to claim their throne. Or at least one of them does, as Romulus commits fratricide. Goodbye Remus, hello Rome. 

While the sculptor of the Capitoline She-wolf remains unknown, this statue was shielded from the relentless hands of time. To preserve the Capitoline She-wolf, along with other delicate artifacts, from the fall of the Roman Empire, the statue was hidden at the base of the Palatine Hill for several centuries. In 1471, Pope Sixtus IV handed over the she-wolf and her two ambitious sons to the Conservators of Rome. The scholars there determined that Capitoline She-Wolf came from the Etruscan civilization, in the fifth century BCE. While the wolf was cast from a single mold of bronze, the twins were a fifteenth-century addition. 

There are many reproductions of this statue around Rome and across the world, thanks to the Fascist dictator and Hitler’s BFF Benito Mussolini. In the 1920s and 1930s, Mussolini sent out copies of the sculpture as gifts all over the world.