| The origin of Valentine's Day is the attempt of the Christian Church to end a popular pagan rite for fertility and purification of the fields, which was held on February 15. Since the fourth century BC, the pagan Romans have paid homage to the god Lupercus in a unique rite. The names of the women and men who worshipped this god were put in an urn and a child extracted the names, mixed up, creating couples who for a whole year would live in intimacy to honor the god and the ritual of fertility and exactly one year later would recreate, always by chance, new couples. Having become too licentious, the festivities were forbidden by Augustus and then suppressed by Pope Gelasio in 494. The ancient Fathers of the Church, considering this old practice immoral, sought a Saint of lovers to replace the libertine Lupercus. A possible candidate was thus found on Valentine's Day, a bishop who had been martyred about two hundred years earlier on February 14. He, first of all, was the first to celebrate the union between a pagan legionnaire and a young Christian, going beyond the conventions that, at that time, had the force of insurmountable obstacles. But Valentine's Day was also chosen because he dedicated his entire life to the Christian community and the city of Terni, the scene of bloody persecution against the Christians themselves, and because he embodied the ideal of the supreme sacrifice in the name of love for their people, their ideals and their faith: It seems that the emperor Claudius II invited the bishop, who had become famous for having married a Christian and a pagan, and tried to push him to embrace paganism, but received in response the attempt of Valentine's Day, aware of the dangers he was facing, to convert the emperor to Christianity. The modern practice of celebrating the feast, on the other hand, centred on the exchange of messages of love and gifts between lovers, probably dates back to the early Middle Ages, and could be traced in particular to the circle of Geoffrey Chaucer, English writer made famous by The Tales of Canterbury, in which the tradition of courteous love took shape. In particular, in the work Parlamento degli Uccelli (Parliament of the Birds), February 14th coincides with the anniversary of the engagement between Richard II of England and Anne of Bohemia, the feast of lovers took hold especially in France and Great Britain, where the numerous Benedictine monasteries helped to spread the history of the Saint (the Basilica of St. Valentine in Terni was in fact entrusted to the Benedictine order in the second half of the seventh century).So they began to mix sacred and profane, until they reached what Valentine's Day is today: a festival that has nothing religious except the name, but that celebrates love in all its forms, especially that of a couple. |
