A Valentine’s Day reflection on Terni: the Italian home of Saint Valentine

The Catholic Herald knows all about where Saint Valentine comes from. His hometown of Terni, about 60 kilometres north of Rome, is where we started our Via di Francesco Camino pilgrimage to Assisi during October 2023.

This Valentine’s Day, though, I am not sure many couples will be romancing there. As Herald editor William Cash notes: “on first impression” the city is “one of the least romantic-looking towns in Italy”.

It was bombed heavily by the Allies in World War II, as it was a major armaments town. Before that its industrial past meant it was more commonly known in Italy as the Steel City. As a result, it doesn’t normally feature on tourism itineraries to Umbria. There are not many foreigners who have ever heard of Terni.

But the fact remains that technically it is the City of Lovers, being where St Valentine was born and anointed as a bishop. He was martyred in the 3rd century and his relics are still kept in the Basilica of San Valentino outside the old town centre. As to why San Valentino is viewed as the symbol of love, there are various theories. But the fact of the matter is that his romantic status is settled in public consciousness – and celebrated.

Given that fact, what is perhaps most remarkable about Terni is how little the town makes of its connection to that figure of romance who today is proclaimed around the secular world on February 14, his “brand” adorning the front of millions of cards, as he keeps flower sellers happy and drives what must be yet another billion-dollar industry.

I didn’t spot one single shop in Terni that was pushing Saint Valentine or Valentine’s Day-related merchandise. There was one hotel named after the saint, that was about all I could find. 

Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Terni, for all that it lacks in architectural merits and tourist draw, is still a thoroughly pleasant and welcomingly unpretentious place to spend a couple of days. The locals are very much salt-of-the-earth types, simple straightforward folk, friendly and helpful – you’d be hard pressed to find a haughty nose raised in the air. 

While the rest of the world appropriates the former bishop of Terni for their own ends, I’ve got no issue with Valentine’s Day being marked and celebrated. By all means, make an extra effort this day for your betrothed or loved one, or someone you want to become your loved one. Given the increasing menace of smart phone culture and lifestyles lived increasingly online in which a shallow sort of “niceness” is policed by woke culture, we need all the prompts and prods we can get to do something real, tangible and heartfelt.

“Most of us now lead lives on social media that are more performance based than we ever could have imagined even a decade ago, and thanks to this burgeoning cult of likeability, in a sense, we’ve all become actors,” US novelist Bret Easton Ellis says in his book White, a polemic about how culture, politics and relationships have changed over the last four decades. “We’ve had to rethink the means with which to express our feelings and thoughts and ideas and opinions in the void created by a corporate culture that is forever trying to silence us by sucking up everything human and contradictory and real with its assigned rule book on how to behave.”

This connects with the main problem I have, which is a corporate-endorsed Valentine’s Day being wielded by a secular society that for the rest of the year makes it so hard to achieve what Saint Valentine is celebrated for.

“Modern society is designed for destroying love,” as the controversial French novelist Michel Houellebecq puts it.

I read it put another way by someone when describing the role of the novel: “If the novel can be said to have one central idea, it is surely that of love, the many forms love takes and all the forces that oppose it” [my italics].

From the #MeToo movement to the societal-wide cult of victimisation and grievances that seems to wind its way into an increasing array of interpersonal relations and interactions, to simplistic narratives about toxic masculinity and the male gaze, it’s increasingly hard for people to dare take a chance on someone else, to open up, risk that spontaneous comment, to be vulnerable – to be human. 

Then when you layer on top of that the industrial scale of modern-day abortion practises, how it is applauded by so much of the media and political establishment; along with the demeaning of marriage, parenthood – especially motherhood (fatherhood doesn’t do that well either, though rather than being diminished overtly it is belittled by being on the whole ignored and simply made out to be an irrelevance in most mainstream parlance) – as well as of the supposedly dull and bland “nuclear” family; not to mention the harms, catastrophes and injustices embraced by so many in the name of Covid-19 and lockdowns to protect “Public Health”; you start to wonder if we are living in one of the most loveless ages in contemporary history, in which any form of genuine caring gets continually squeezed out by narcissistic posturing, hollow self-validation or “risk management”.

Being confronted by all that most of the time nowadays, in comparison Terni feels pretty romantic: a humble Italian town, surrounded by the pretty Umbrian hills, in which family and community life still seem to matter, and which, despite its lack of fame and credibility, is a place where you feel that love might still be in the air for two lucky souls.

Photo: St Valentine Baptizing St Lucilla by Jacopo Bassano  (1510–1592). (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.)

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