during the course of a year i spent in the eternal city, the Roman she-wolf edged her way into my daily life, subtly yet insistently demanding this book be written. Living in Rome made the encounter inevitable: No one can go to Rome and not meet the she-wolf. There was a stone she-wolf suckling twins on the façade of my children's elementary school and other she-wolves lactating on several public buildings that my family passed every day. A she-wolf, teeth and udders exposed, was stuccoed above each entrance to the neighborhood covered market where we did much of our shopping. She-wolves were engraved on the potholes and trash cans in our neighborhood and airbrushed on the sides of the delivery van to the little grocery store next door, and – more predictably – she-wolves graced the sides of monuments that we admired and the hallways of museums we visited.

The timing of our arrival in the summer of 2006 made the she-wolf's presence all the more unavoidable: She had just been chosen – not surprisingly – as the mascot for Rome's first film festival. In preparation for the weeklong October event, posters featuring the photograph of a live wolf dotted the city. Although she strikes the pose of the bronze statue in the Capitoline Museum – standing and looking intently at her viewer, ready to attack, heedless of the babies tugging at her distended udders – the focus is on the animal's face, adorned by a glittering red carnival mask shaped like a butterfly.