Please Put Away That Ridiculous Centurion Costume …
I have a problem with Rome.
Not the city, of course. Not the crumbling Coliseum, not the many museums (including the Vatican’s, where you can find not one but two Roman copies of the famous seated Molosser statue … ), and of course not the cacio e pepe (though I do wish they would start dinner at a more reasonable hour — I’m watching “90 Day Fiance” reruns by 9 p.m.).
No, the problem I have with Rome is the almost reflexive role it plays in explaining any aspect of Italian history — not least of all its dogs.
Even before ChatGPT turned everyone and their brother into a visual artist, Corso breeders were peppering their websites with Photoshopped images of themselves dressed up like one of Augustus’ finest — crested helmet, red cloak, bronze chest plate, gleaming biceps, and on and on.
Eye catching … maybe.
A bit silly? If you know anything about history … definitely.
History Mystery
The fable that is told about the origins of the Corso (and the Neapolitan Mastiff, for that matter) is that it is the descendent of the Roman Molosser, the Canis pugnax (literally, “fighting dog” in Latin).
If you’re going for dramatic effect, this is definitely the historical canine you want to grab for: a renowned, chain-mail-swathed war dog that accompanied Roman legionnaires, attacking enemy mounts, scattering adversaries like bowling pins, and faithfully guarding the camps at night.
Click here for a video that is as inane as it is historically dubious, with AI-induced dogs that evoke everything from Belgian Malinois to Border Collies.
Whatever happened to historical accuracy?
Now that we have that out of our system, let’s apply a little common sense:
The Roman Empire as we know it ceased to exist in 476 CE. Technically, that’s not when Rome fell, as its political structures relocated to Constantinople in the Byzantine Empire, but for all intents and purposes that great Italian city’s culture had basically collapsed by the end of the first millennium post-Christ. Thanks to invasions, plagues and famine, Rome’s population — which at its peak was 100,000 around 500 CE — fell to 20,000 within a century. Aqueducts and roads began crumbling, and the glorious empire became a hologram.
Roman ruins in the city of Rome. We can't assume the dogs of a millennium and a half ago fared any better.
So we’re supposed to believe that the Cane Corso not only survived all this social disorder and cultural impoverishment, but managed to persevere for a millennium and a half?
Um, there’s this bridge in Brooklyn …
‘Dog of the Circus’
Maybe you’re not ready to part with the Roman myth just quite yet. That’s understandable, as it has a powerful cultural undertow. In fact, it was the unifying principle of the 19th Century’s Risorgimento, or unification of Italy. How else could dozens of tribal regions, each with its own dialect (in some cases, language is a better descriptor), influences and cultural identity, be united?
Simple: Remind them that at one time they were all under the yoke of Rome, even if they didn’t identify as such, even if culturally that was a stretch.
An 1861 cartoon showing unification architects Cavour and Garibaldi fashioning the country of Italy the way a cobbler would craft a leather boot — with force and persuasian (the awl and the soap).
The region I come from is a case in point: My grandparents in the Italian Alps considered themselves “Tirolesi,” as had dozens of generations before them, who were far more culturally tied to the Austrian Tyrol to the north. But erect a statue of Dante in the capital of Trento, face him toward the mountains, and miraculously we became “Trentini.” Then there are the Sardinians, whose resentment of Rome is often as ominous as their masked, bell-clanging Mamuthones, or the Neapolitans, who fought bitterly against unification, even when it seemed inevitable. And then there are the Sicilians … well, we'll get to them shortly.
Paolo Breber — who was among the first to attempt to save the Cane Corso from extinction, though his efforts were later folded into the formal recovery undertaken in Mantua in the ’80s — is willing to entertain the Roman myth, even if no written evidence exists. After all, the Romans were notorious cultural appropriators. (Consider that everything from their statuary to their gods were Greek knock-offs.)
But it’s certainly possible, Breber theorizes, that the Romans returned from their eastern campaigns with Molosser-type dogs, which history tells us originated in Mesopotamia, though he doubts their effectiveness on the battlefield. And, Breber writes, “we do have a mention of dogs used in the blood sports of the circus.” He cites the Roman historian and politician Tacitus, who described the martyrdom of Christians in the first century, sometimes by being ripped apart by dogs. “He writes that in order to induce the dogs to attack, the Christians had to be disguised in animal skins,” Breber continues. “This stratagem implies that these dogs were unaccustomed to attacking humans and were usually used for fighting beasts such as bear- and bull-baiting.”
His conclusion? “A Roman mastiff for war still awaits documentary evidence, but in the case of a mastiff used in circus games by the Romans we are on firmer ground. But then if I were a breeder wishing to promote his Cane Corsos I would hesitate to claim an ancestry with these circus dogs considering the purpose they were used for.”
You Said a Mouthful
One of the biggest problems with the Rome theory centers on one of the biggest points of contention — and commentary — in the Corso.
And that would be the bite.
All the world’s standards agree that the ideal bite for a Corso is a tight underbite, in which the bottom incisors are placed in front of the upper ones. This undershot bite is ideal for grabbing and holding, but not for killing. For that, you want a scissors bite.
Without putting too fine a point on it, this is why the Boerboel has a scissors bite when its biggest genetic contributor, the Bullmastiff, does not: In racially charged South Africa, the Afrikkaner farmers didn’t care if the Boerboel killed any intruders it encountered, compared to Victorian-era Britain, where the patrolling Bullmastiff was supposed to hold a poacher until the local authorities arrived. The first bite (scissors) slashes and kills; the second (undershot) holds and preserves.
If the Cane Corso was the descendent of war dogs, it would have a scissors bite, not an undershot one.
Then there’s the matter of that undershot bite itself. Breeding a functional mouth with a wide jaw and undershot bite is not easy. Perpetuating that mouth generation after generation requires even more skill. While the farmers of Italy’s poverty-stricken Meridionale were clever men who knew how to make the most of the little they possessed, they had neither the resources nor the breeding tradition to breed a mouth like the Corso has. That mouth — which has persisted for centuries upon centuries in Southern Italy — was genetically stabilized long before the Cane Corso showed up in Puglia.
The Sicilian Defense
It is said that the Cane Corso has existed in the south of Italy for centuries — written and oral records peter out long before the breed did.
This is entirely and completely believable.
But instead of looking north to Rome, perhaps canine historians should look west, to Sicily, where Corso-type dogs also existed, albeit with slightly different phenotypes. Claudio Giuliani's hefty book The Cane Corso Italiano (which — full disclosure — I recently translated and published), contains a fascinating chapter by Giovanni Tumminelli discussing the presence of the Corso on the island. Many of these Sicilian dogs tended to be wider in body and shorter in leg — more bulldoggy, for lack of a better word. And they were given different names, many of which have been lost to the tides of time.
Above: Cane Corso on traditional carramatto cart the 1960s. Below: Cane Corso with the Denaro family, 1950s. Both photos from Vittoria, Ragusa, Sicily.
One example is found in the town of Racalmuto, located about 50 miles southeast of Palermo. Its native son, writer Leonardo Sciascia, wrote Occhio di Capra, a dictionary of the town’s words and phrases. Among them is an entry for a now-extinct dog called the barruggieddru, which in Italian means bargello, or the head of the police force.
“And it is the name that many farmers still give to their dogs who are most ready to attack strangers who approach the house, the big, growling bastards who are chained during the day and set free at night," Sciascia continues. "By the same concept, they are called ‘cani corsi’ (of Corsica), judges, policemen, bailiffs: in short, all those who are responsible for enforcing the laws and administering justice. But what exactly was the breed of cane corso, we do not know; nor do we believe there are still any in Sicily. And they must have been dogs of particular ferocity, if a decree of Charles III prohibited the cops from using cani corsi in the pursuit of criminals (30 November 1750).”
Sciascia was wrong about the breed coming from Corsica. But he was right about its police-dog roots, largely forgotten today but mentioned in the original standard and demonstrated by the intense interest in protection work among devotees of the breed.
(Just as an aside, Sciascia has some other memorable entries about dogs that show how in rural cultures, the attributed of its animals are often visited on residents, and vice versa. Like "Lu Cane Di Pinu," or Pino's Dog, an all-white creature who was the epitome of successful laziness, spending his time scooping up the delicious, sugar-coated taralli biscuits that fell to the ground of his master's bakery. "From such nourishment, it was believed, he derived an erotic power that everyone acknowledged as inexhaustible," Sciascia writes. "He was therefore cited as a case to be envied, as an existence to aspire to: sometimes in discussions of work, of hard work; more often in discussions of women.")
Gianni Vullo’s wonderful little book, Le Razze Canine Siciliane, gives a great overview of the iterations of Molosser-type dogs that existed in Sicily. The Dogo Siciliano, the Alano Siciliano, the Vuccirisco and the Branchiero (which many will remember as underpinning the foundational American Corso lines), may have been more land races than breeds, but the latter two in particular clearly had bulldog-type dogs in their background. That conformation — including the undershot jaw — wasn’t the only thing bulldoggy trait inherited by the Corso: There’s also the breed’s very strong inclination to work with and control cattle.
Vullo cites a veritable conga line of cultural influences in Sicily — the Greeks, Romans, Normans and Spanish. Not mentioned but certainly influential were the Moors, who controlled Sicily for more than two centuries, and whose passion for bull-baiting undoubtedly also influenced the development of the Molossers of the Spanish-controlled Balearic islands, including the Presa Canario of the Canary Islands and Ca de Bou of Mallorca.
Mosaic of a boar hunt from Villa Romana del Casale near Piazza Armerina in Sicily dating to the 4th Century BCE. While cropped and docked, the dog depicted is lighter boned than a modern Corso and appears to have a scissors bite.
As for the Romans, they left behind mosaics depicting some Corso-looking dogs. But one could argue that the dogs were already there, as Sicily was one of the first territories conquered by Rome, serving as a beadbasket for the empire. It had previously had been in the hands of the ancient North African empire of Carthage.
Arrivederci, Roma
In the end, one can only guess at exactly who brought the Cane Corso to the Italian South, and how the breed is related to other Continental Molossers. But one thing is pretty evident — to me, at least — even if it might be as sacrilegious to some as the idea of drinking cappuccino in the afternoon or putting pineapple on a pizza: The Cane Corso didn’t stride into Italy at the flank of a centurion any more than Russell Crowe’s Maximus character in “Gladiator” actually existed.
But that’s Hollywood — and dog mythology — for you.