The emotional resonance of the image — two female figures, found in each other’s arms, dying together in the volcanic catastrophe — generated considerable attention over the years. A secondary interpretation, advanced by some and not dismissed by officials at the park, was that the pair might have been lovers. Massimo Osanna, a former superintendent at Pompeii, had previously stated publicly that a romantic relationship was “a hypothesis that cannot be dismissed.”
The DNA result introduced a complication that the earlier interpretations had not considered. The pair included at least one individual whose genetic data indicated a male chromosomal pattern. The sex of the second individual was not definitively established from the data available in the published study.
The finding eliminates the interpretation of the pair as sisters or as mother and daughter, since the previous interpretations rested on an assumption that both were female. It does not eliminate the possibility of a romantic relationship. If both individuals were male, or one was male and one female, a romantic interpretation remains structurally consistent with the finding, though it cannot be confirmed. If one was male and the other’s sex remains undetermined, all possibilities remain open within that uncertainty.
The researchers estimated the ages of the pair as roughly fourteen to nineteen years for one individual and young adulthood for the other. The fragmentary and mixed state of the bone material inside the casts, and the complications introduced by previous restoration work, constrained what the genetic analysis could establish with certainty.
The pair’s conventional name in Italian popular culture — *le due fanciulle*, the two maidens — reflected the assumption of their sex, which was embedded in their name before the DNA study was conducted. The study’s findings are a reason to hold that name as a historical artifact rather than a current description.