Our culture is fascinated by stories of feral children, endlessly obsessed with the intersection between the wild and the civilized, the place where animals and humans can interact. All children play out Dr. Doolittle fantasies, wishing to talk to animals, or run away with their dogs. At least we pretended that our pets could talk back to us. That’s normal, right? Either way, we’ve been thinking about how feral children fantasies abound in fiction, film and mythology, and thought we’d gather some of our favorites here. The tales are remarkably similar, while each being singular, though we particularly wonder why it is so often wolves that are the caregivers in these stories — they don’t seem to be the wildest or most dangerous thing that could be imagined (hello, lions) or the most human-like. In addition, we think it’s amazing how often the feral children don’t return to society in the end — we would imagine a moralistic tale ending with the child being returned safely to soap and silverware, but that seems to be slightly antithetical to the genre. Click through for our round-up of our favorite fictional feral children, and let us know what you think.

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Slated to open in February 2010 is Zaha Hadid’s plan for Maxxi, the Italian national museum of 21st century art. The museum is situated in the northern outskirts of Rome, near the grounds of the 1960 Olympics and a stone’s throw away from two other architectural attractions, Renzo Piano’s music hall and Pier Luigi Nervi’s sports palace. The museum, empty of artwork until the spring, will be the main exhibition this weekend during a two-day architectural preview for the citizens of Rome, an urban center steeped in ancient history and curiously devoid of any groundbreaking contemporary architecture.

As New York Times architecture critic (and our idol) Nicolai Ouroussoff writes, Hadid’s quietly incendiary design “jolts this city back to the present like a thunderclap.” Find out why after the jump.

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