RECYCLING THE SHE-WOLF AND THE DIPTYCH OF RAMBONA

Rome is a palimpsest, it is often said: as the shapes of old writing remain faintly visible under more recent layers of text on a manuscript repeatedly inscribed, traces of the city's past also may be read underneath its current appearance. Elizabeth Barrett Browning said it well in 1854: “It's a palimpsest Rome – a watering place written over the antique” (2: 165). The Eternal City destroys nothing, preferring to transform objects instead to suit current beliefs and customs: Temples become churches when a cross is placed at their heart, pagan monuments are turned Christian by the addition of holy people's statues, images of gods are allegorized into the likeness of saints, and so on. Neither the words telling of the she-wolf nor the images that picture the Roman beast have escaped this process of reconstruction and reinterpretation through verbal and visual representation. Rome and the she-wolf play at writing and rewriting their own past; Rome and the she-wolf constantly recycle themselves – like sheets of parchment too precious to discard after just one use. The city's layers, like the she-wolf's, are physical as well as literary, artistic, and – more generally – cultural; they embrace objects and texts as well as beliefs and practices.

“It is curious to note in Rome how many a modern superstition has its root in an ancient one,” noticed William Wetmore Story in 1863, “and how tenaciously customs still cling to their old localities.”