Ancient Rome's she-wolf statue not so ancient?

ROME -- She suckled Rome's legendary twin founders and fed Benito Mussolini's ambitious dreams of renewed imperial glories.

For centuries, the she-wolf has been one of Rome's most powerful symbols. But now some experts are contending that the bronze statue in a city museum atop Capitoline Hill might not be so old after all.

New theories suggest that the statue dates from the Middle Ages, and not from Etruscan times, as has long been held.

"It's decisively medieval," said Anna Maria Carruba, a researcher who studied the statue when she worked on its restoration a decade ago. "As I went ahead with my research, I was ever more sure," Carruba said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.

While medieval might sound old to modern ears, if Carruba is correct the statue would be more than 1,000 years younger than had been thought — from the 7th or 8th centuries, or even later, instead of Etruscan times.

The Capitoline Museums website says the statue, known as Lupa, or she-wolf, is from the 5th century B.C. and was donated to the museum in 1471 by Pope Sixtus IV.

Added separately, in the early 1500s, were the bronze figures of Romulus and Remus, the twin founders of Rome who legend says were abandoned on the Tiber river's banks and survived by being nursed by the she-wolf.

The 30-inch-high bronze is the centerpiece of a museum room named after it, and postcards and T-shirts with its image are popular Rome souvenirs. Mussolini used the image in his regime's propaganda pushing for a return to ancient Roman glories.

In a front-page article this week in Rome daily La Repubblica, Adriano La Regina, who for decades headed the national archaeological office for Rome, suggested that the Capitoline Museums was reluctant to release test results indicating the bronze was medieval.

"The new information about the epoch of the Capitoline bronze have been held back for about a year now from the public and experts," La Regina wrote.

With the future — or rather, the past — of one of the city-run Capitoline Museums star pieces at stake, museums director Claudio Parisi Presicce insisted that his institution wasn't trying to hide data that could subtract centuries from the she-wolf's existence.