About Our Name

In the opening canto of Inferno, Dante is set upon by allegorical beasts, a leopard, a lion and a she-wolf which, according to scholarly interpretation, stand for human vices, The most terrifying of these is the ravenous she-wolf, a symbol of avarice – “She tracks down all, kills all, and knows no glut, but, feeding, she grows hungrier than she was.”

But Virgil, Dante’s guide, counsels that the wolf will die, killed by a greyhound – ‘l veltro – which drives her back to Hell, “whence envy once released her on the world,” making way for Virgil, the voice of reason, and Dante to continue their passage onward.