He wanted to be the century.

And yet, Scurati’s genius is to show that the wolf was also a son. The son of a blacksmith and a schoolteacher. The son of socialist utopias and Nietzschean ambitions. The son of an age that had just watched millions of young men choke on mud and gas in the trenches—and then, having lost its faith in reason, knelt before anyone who promised to make the trains run on time and the crowds tremble.

Not a man of his time, but the time itself—its pulse, its wound, its howl. Benito Mussolini looked at the 1900s and saw not a stage but a raw, unformed lump of clay. And he believed, with the faith of the madman and the artist both, that his hands alone could shape it.

The answer is a man hanging upside down. The answer is a century that still, today, recognises its son.