"Love, in all its splendor and mess, found a fit expression on Rome’s oldest bridge last year. Inspired by a best-selling book, then the movie version, young couples wrote their names on a padlock. They chained their lock around lampposts on Ponte Milvio. Then they symbolically cut off escape by tossing the keys into the wine-dark Tiber below." So begins Ian Fisher's article "Love Rite on a Bridge, but Is the Romance Fading?" in The New York Times (06 Aug 07).
Fisher continues this dreamy story: "But reality quickly set in, as it often does after passion. Thousands of locks and chains piled up. The lamps atop two light posts crumbled under the weight. Neighbors complained of vandalism. Politicians who tried to solve the problem were accused – and this is bad in Italy – of being anti-love."
"Late last month, a solution was put into place. City officials set up six sets of steel posts with chains on the bridge, so now lovers can declare themselves without damage to the infrastructure. And so this city of monuments has just creater another one, if at a cost: tossing a key off Ponte Milvio, some Italians complain, may soon be as touristy as flipping a coin into the Trevi Foiuntain."
Last year, the writer Federico Moccia created the second installment of a story of young Romans called 'I Want You.' Like many affairs, his hero’s starts with a lie: he convinces a potential girlfriend of an invented legend in which lovers wrap a lock and a chain around the third lamppost on the bridge’s northern side, lock it and throw the key into the Tiber. 'And then? the girls asks. 'We’ll never leave each other,' he says, with no shame."
"Mr. Moccia, 44, said he dreamed up the ritual. „I liked the idea of tying locks to love because it is more solid, tangible,“ he said. The book sold 1.1 million copies, then the movie came out and soon life began imitating art.
Mr. Moccia said he was stunned when locks and chains appeared on the brdige, though he tied the craze to a lingering malaise in Italy. "It is a precise sign of our times – there is a lack of dreaming,“ he said. "We only hear bad news. There is no longer the smile of who we see from afar or near the dream. And that gesture of the lock on the bridge, of the feeling of the iron closing, it’s a promise. It’s beautiful.“
Yes, yes! Dream on!