According to the legend, when King Numitor, grandfather of the twins, was overthrown by his brother Amulius in Alba Longa, the usurper ordered them to be cast into the Tiber River.

[5] The sculpture has been housed since 1471 in the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Campidoglio (the ancient Capitoline Hill), Rome, Italy, and many replicas are in various places around the world.

[7] Pliny the Elder mentions the presence in the Roman Forum of a statue of a she-wolf that was "a miracle proclaimed in bronze nearby, as though she had crossed the Comitium while Attus Navius was taking the omens".

The 18th-century German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann attributed the statue to an Etruscan maker in the fifth century BC, based on how the wolf's fur was depicted.

August Emil Braun, the secretary of the Archaeological Institute of Rome, proposed in 1854 that the damage to the wolf's paw had been caused by an error during casting.

[11] In 2006, Italian art historian Anna Maria Carruba and archaeologist Adriano La Regina contested the traditional dating of the wolf on the basis of an analysis of the casting technique.

Single-piece casting was widely used in the Middle Ages to mould bronze items that needed a high level of rigidity, such as bells and cannons.

In addition, La Regina, former superintendent of Rome's archaeological heritage, argues that the sculpture's artistic style is more akin to Carolingian and Romanesque art than that of the ancient world.

"[12] However, a recent study by John Osborne at the British School at Rome concluded that the radiocarbon and thermoluminescence dates were totally inconsistent.

He pointed out that metal from which the wolf is made is of the Etruscan type, using copper from Sardinia, and that there is no sign of the adulteration common in medieval times.

In the 10th-century Chronicon of Benedict of Soracte, the monk chronicler writes of the institution of a supreme court of justice "in the Lateran Palace, in the place called the Wolf, viz, the mother of the Romans."

[14] The 12th-century English cleric Magister Gregorius wrote a descriptive essay De Mirabilibus Urbis Romae[15] and recorded in an appendix three pieces of sculpture he had neglected; one was the wolf in the portico, at the principal entrance to the Lateran Palace.

In December 1471, Pope Sixtus IV ordered the present sculpture to be transferred to the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitoline Hill, and the twins were added some time around then.

It was used as the logo for Artie Ripp's record label Family Productions, which in 1971 released Billy Joel's first album as a solo artist, Cold Spring Harbor.

[21] Anthony Mann's 1964 epic film The Fall of the Roman Empire prominently features an enlarged replica prop of the Capitoline Wolf as a republican symbol at the back of the Senate House, where, historically, the altar and statue of Victory would have stood.