Now, before you look at the photos, you might think that since a ferry requires there to be a body of water, a fence on a walkway near the ferry will be a reasonable place for fulfilling the basic requirements for the locks of love:

Lee’s Unofficial Guide to the Locks of Love

1. Get a padlock with a key and a magic marker

2. Write your name and your beloved’s name on the padlock

3. Lock the padlock to a bridge over a body of water.

4. Toss the key into said water.

5. Congratulations, your lock is now attached to the bridge forever as a romantic symbol of your undying love.

You will note that steps #3 and #4 require there to be water.  Crucially, step #4 really needs it, since the whole idea of this “tradition” is that the key gets thrown into the water and lost forever, thereby making the padlock permanently attached to the fence in step #3. It can’t be a symbol of eternal love if you can easily go retrieve the key.

I didn’t make the rules of the game, I just report them.

But take a look at the Seattle Locks of Love I saw on that walkway near the ferry:

Locks of Love in Seattle – photo #1

Locks of Love in Seattle – photo #2

Seriously? Locks of Love here?  Really? This is just all wrong. There are steps just off the right of the photo that would take you down to the street where you could retrieve the key. Sigh.

It’s not the first time I’ve seen badly positioned locks, of course. But at least the landlocked locks seen in last year’s Locks in Translation were placed near a view. In retrospect, I clearly shouldn’t have been so critical of those…

1. Get a padlock with a key and a magic marker

2. Write your name and your beloved’s name on the padlock

3. Lock the padlock to a bridge over a body of water.

4. Toss the key in the river. The lock is now attached to the bridge forever, a symbol of your undying love.

Here are links to previous posts about them for reference:

– on Two to Tübingen

– on Two Together

– on To to BZ (warning: some photos don’t display on all of these)

Now, it’s probably just me, but I think of this idea as appealing to  young lovers who don’t have a lot of money but want that big romantic gesture.  I know it can be — and is often — done by anyone of any age. But that’s just my mental model: poor but hopelessly in love romantic types, who are spending a couple of bucks on an “eternal” symbol of their love.

Until today that is. Here’s an ad I spotted in a luxury travel magazine today while waiting in a doctor’s office:

Chase Sapphire Credit Card Ad

Here’s the text in white in case you can’t make it out:

So you can

Rent a motorbike in Milan
Head for Cinque Terre
Walk along Via dell’Amore
Seal your love with a padlock on the bridge
And discover the thrill of cliffside dining

Too funny.

BTW, hopefully you can also get money from an ATM to buy that padlock with this card, because — to borrow an older ad campaign — I’m pretty sure the little souvenir stalls by the bridge who typically sell the locks won’t take either American Express or this Chase Preferred Sapphire Visa.

Just to review, the original novel has a man promising eternal love to a woman by writing their names on a lock, locking it to a railing, and throwing away the key into the river. The intent is that their love is as external as the lock that is now forever fastened to the railing.

The fact that in the book the man does this with many women — and not just one — is something that conveniently gets overlooked by the lovers who aim to repeat this tradition.

Anyway, here’s a lock that is attached to a lamppost, not a railing. But at least it’s by a river, so theoretically Antony and Yuki (“antonyuki”) could have tossed their key into the water below:

Locks of Love, near the Adige River, Verona

But then there are other lovers that seem a little unclear on the concept. For example, note all the locks fastened to a wall at the top of the hill, far from the river or any body of water in which to toss the key:

Hilltop Locks of Love, Verona

Today we walked by some attached to the top of an old well; the middle has at least 6 or 7 locks dangling from it, plus there are other locks attached to the side rails:

Well with Locks of Love dangling from the top

While on the one hand the concept of the well is a clever idea as a receptacle for the key, but unfortunately it’s clear that the lid of this well is tightly locked down:

Locked well cover

Anyway, the novel that is said to have spawned this modern tradition was written in the 1970s or 1980s and written in Italian. So it’s hard to reconcile how the key element — pun intended — to the story, where true love is demonstrated by irretrievably tossing the key into a deep body of water, seems to have been lost in translation here in the Italian city of Verona.

The first thing I saw was the oddity of seeing a man locking the door in the first photo below. Of course, that’s the Friendly Tourist — and not the local man whose door it was — posing to illustrate what was odd about this lock:

Lock of the Giant? (with the Friendly Tourist), Verona

I mean, look how high that lock is. Verona really is the land of the giants, I guess. I mean, at my (lack of) height, I could never live in that place, since I’d never be able to reach that lock.

The second odd thing about locks was stumbling upon an unexpected area for some of those Locks of Love that are so ubiquitous in European cities these days. Normally one spies these locks on a bridge, but in the photo below they are on a fence — that serves no obvious purpose — along one part of the Adige River here in Verona:

Locks along the Adige, Verona

The fence was quite long, and I decided to attempt a “sweep panorama” shot with my cell phone to try to capture the length of it. The results were not exactly an advertisement for the sweep panorama algorithm on my cell phone, though since it (seemingly) should have been fairly straightforward to piece together the portions of the fence.   But it clearly wasn’t:

A Sweep through the Locks of Love

Further, if we take a look at just the righthand portion of that photo,  we can see that it incorrectly shows a couple of the same locks twice:

“Everlasting” Locks of Love

Now perhaps that is an interesting way to represent the “everlasting” nature of the love the locks are supposed to represent, but showing them in a repeating fashion?

Well, perhaps. But it is at least an interesting effect nonetheless.