Monsters and mythical creatures of Rome, from the she-wolf to Bernini’s elephant

To view Rome not merely through its characters, its streets, its events and its history, but by observing those symbols, those creatures which, emerging from the depths of myth and travelling through the centuries and across changing sensibilities, have come to form the visible and invisible architecture of the very essence of the city. This is precisely what Fabrizio Falconi does in his book "Mostri e animali fantastici di Roma", published by Newton Compton.

The city, with its marble, its hills, its ups and downs and its crossroads, has forged an unbreakable pact with animals – a pact through which the wild and alchemical essence of the animal flows, like blood through the arteries, into lived experience and the shadows of mythography. An organism of memories and spectres which, like a forest of marble, tarmac and smog, harbours statues, symbols and animal figures within its buildings and along its streets. Unsurprisingly, the first animal the text engages with is the archetype of Roman identity: the she-wolf. A maternal yet bestial form, capable at once of warlike aggression and tender care, which allowed Roman civilisation to take root. Alongside the she-wolf—whose myth Falconi explores, as well as the sculptural depictions that now adorn the city—the animals of Rome’s earliest days are recalled: the flight of birds used by the augurs to scrutinise the workings of fate, and the famous geese, which in popular wisdom have now become as well-known as the she-wolf.

The analysis of the animal, conducted amidst the carnivorous exuberance of the city’s evolution, allows us to see the teeming animality that characterises Rome as more than just a metaphor. We may smile or be outraged when we see wild boars roaming the city streets, but in those scenes of modern decay there is a resurgence, an animal spirit that reconnects with the city’s ancestral roots. Falconi traces the symbolism and practical use of animals in the Imperial era, from Caligula’s horse to the wild beasts used in the arena and the bulls of the Mithraic cults, hinting at that blend of grandeur, beauty and radical cruelty.

Then there is medieval Rome, and it is here that the beast becomes a monster. An imaginative marble catalogue of dragons intermingling with stags and peacocks hints at the restless, twilight atmosphere of a city that was once magnificent, vast and powerful, but which now, in the heart of the Middle Ages, has been reduced to a chaotic, ramshackle jumble of ruins overgrown with climbing plants.

In Renaissance and Baroque Rome, symbols are set in stone, and the city transforms into an organism that jealously guards its own monsters and contradictions. Often animal-like, in fact. And so we find ourselves in the presence of Bernini’s elephant, the stuffed armadillo linked to Athanasius Kircher’s swirling cosmos, Dürer’s rhinoceros and the turtles of Rome’s fountains. Art sublimates the spirit of the city and all that it has embodied and represented, and the animal – whether real, monstrous or iconographic – elaborates upon its archetypes.

Given that the book does not merely trace its way back through the centuries and historical developments, but also dwells on various manifestations of the animal, it is inevitable that there should be a section on the real animals that inhabit the city. From the rats that gave rise to the famous saying about ‘tripe for cats’, to the cats themselves – those felines that inhabit the Roman ruins, meowing and lingering on rooftops and amongst the archways, becoming an integral part of Rome’s urban landscape.

And then there is the diorama of animality, the perfect synthesis that Foucault would have described as ‘medical’: the Bioparco, which brings together almost all these animals within its visitor areas, and into which crowds immerse themselves, not yet fully realising that they are not simply visiting a celebration of more or less exotic animals. On the contrary, they are gazing into the maelstrom of animality that takes us back to the very roots of the city.