Lupercale or nymphaeum? ... the grotto under Palatine Hill
Remember the sanctuary discovered in Rome earlier this month which the ancient Romans believed was the cave where the founders of the city, Romulus and Remus, were suckled by a she-wolf? Well, the story didn't end there.
For the doyen of early Roman archaeology, Andrea Carandini, there was no more than "one doubt in a thousand" this was the so-called Lupercale for which scholars have been searching fruitlessly for decades.
But the very next day, a figure of comparable standing, Adriano La Regina, declared he was even more convinced of the opposite. In a string of interviews, La Regina, who until three years ago was the official responsible for Rome's vast archaeological patrimony, said: "I am sure that this is not the Lupercale".
His central argument rested on the main contemporary text. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing towards the end of the 1st century BC, described the she-wolf's lair as being near the Temple of Victory, which had been built almost 200 years earlier higher up the Palatine hill and further west. However, said La Regina, the richly decorated underground space found near the Circus Maximus is closer to the much bigger temple of Apollo. If this really were the Lupercale, then Dionysius would surely have described it as being near there.
He acknowledged it was an important find. But, he said, it was almost certainly a nymphaeum - a shrine to the nymphs, fashioned from a cave. La Regina thought it might well have formed part of Nero's first palace, the one the emperor occupied before the great fire of Rome in 64 BC.
His remarks rekindled an old rivalry. The main political beneficiary of the press conference at which the first images of the supposed Lupercale were shown was Italy's publicity-hungry culture minister, Francesco Rutelli, whose name was plastered over the next day's front pages. As mayor of Rome until 2001, Rutelli clashed repeatedly with the city's then archaeological overlord, Adriano La Regina.
So far the most authoritative voice to comment on the clash of opinions between Carandini and La Regina has been raised in support of the former. Patrizio Pensabene, like Carandini a professor at La Sapienza university, spent 10 years excavating the area of the Temple of Victory.
In an interview with Corriere della Sera, he explained that the temple was part of a wider public works project initiated at the end of the 4th century BC in imitation of the Athenian acropolis. It had the same "religious topography".
It is known the Lupercale was employed for the worship of Faunus, the Romans' reinvention of Pan. So, just as Pan's cave was aligned with the Parthenon on the Acropolis, you would expect the Lupercale to line up with the Temple of Victory.
A line traced down the middle of the site of the temple he excavated would indeed lead you to the grotto at the centre of what is fast becoming Italy's biggest archaeological controversy.
