The She-Wolf on the Capitoline

Our walk ends at the statue the city uses as its signature: a she-wolf with two suckling boys beneath her.

The Romans never agreed on how Romulus died. The official story had him swept up into a cloud during a thunderstorm on the Campus Martius, the old field of Mars, carrying on as the god Quirinus. A more stubborn rumour said the senators had carried him out of the meeting hall in pieces, hidden under their togas. On the Forum, beneath a slab of black marble called the Lapis Niger, lies a shrine the Romans themselves had already stopped understanding, and which they pointed to as his grave.

The she-wolf on this square is a copy set on a column, and the original stands inside the Capitoline Museums, which you need a ticket to enter.

That statue carries its own puzzle. For centuries it passed as Etruscan work from the fifth century BC, until radiocarbon research at the start of this century pointed to a casting date in the Middle Ages, somewhere between the eleventh and the thirteenth century. That debate is still running.

The two little boys are later in any case: they were added around 1471, probably by Antonio del Pollaiolo, and only then did this become the founding story cast in bronze.

Thanks for coming along on this walk. There are more routes through Rome to discover: the ancient heart along the Forum and the Colosseum, the murder of Julius Caesar hour by hour, and the ghetto with the story of 16 October 1943.

The staircase in front of you runs down to Piazza Venezia, where buses leave in every direction.