You learn something new every day...

David & Marissa (who, by the way, think it's weird that I'm posting this on my blog) have been reading Plutarch this school year.  Plutarch was a Greek writer alive from 46 to 120 AD, best known for his Parallel Lives, in which he compares and contrasts famous Roman and Greek people.

Last term they read about Theseus, the Greek founder of Athens, and now they are reading about Romulus, the founder of Rome.  Yesterday as they were telling me the legend of his (and his twin brother Remus') birth, suddenly a sculpture flashed into my mind.  I'm not sure, but I probably learned about it in a mostly-forgotten Art History class in college.

We looked it up online and learned that the sculpture of the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus is called the Capitoline Wolf.  As I looked at a photo of the sculpture in a European square somewhere, I read that it is housed in the Capitoline Museum in Rome, and has been since 1471.  Obviously the photo I was looking at wasn't in a museum, so there must be a copy of it somewhere.  After a bit more searching online and finding many photos of the sculpture, this is what we learned.

Here is the original Capitoline Wolf sculpture, housed in the Capitoline Museum in Rome.  It was originally thought to be 5th century Etruscan, but apparently it was really made in the 13th century, and the twins were added later.

According to Wikipedia, Benito Mussolini, who saw himself as the founder of the "New Rome", liked the wolf sculpture so much that he had a bunch of copies of it made and sent as gifts all around the world.  If you click on this link, you can see in what cities the copies are.  I was startled to learn that one is in front of the Chippewa County Courthouse in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, just a few hours from our old hometown!

Here is the copy of the Capitoline Wolf in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan.  It seems that there they refer to it as the "She-Wolf", rather than the Capitoline Wolf.

I had no idea...