Treccani celebrates Saint Valentine, the first bishop of Terni born in the first half of the 4th century, and sheds light on the feast of lovers, in an entry in the Biographical Dictionary of Italians edited by Edoardo D'Angelo.
The attribution of patronage over lovers is linked to the bishop of Terni, but it derives from much later events that have nothing to do with the historical reality of the character.
It was in fact Pope Gelasius I, around 495, who decided to abolish the lascivious pagan festival of Lupercalia, linked to the pagan rites of fertility and purification typical of the end of winter, which ran from 13 to 15 February.
In this way Valentine of Terni, whose feast day fell on February 14, was assumed as the protector of chaste and modest love, of legal and official unions, thus becoming more famous over the years than Pope Gelasius I. The extension was even
more foreign and artificial. of this first cultural deviation: the fortunate association between love and Valentine's Day, which had and continues to have an exceptional diffusion especially in countries of Anglo-Saxon culture.
It was probably introduced, it is debated whether ex nihilo or relying on some tradition, by the English writer Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400), in the poem The Parliament of Birds.
Here, associating Valentine's anniversary with the engagement of Richard II of England with Anne of Bohemia, the poet calls the saint to supervise the celebration of love which in late February takes hold of all the creatures scattered across the Earth by Mother Nature, including birds (Oruch, 1981).
The Biographical Dictionary of Italians, with its 40,000 profiles, all published online, traces a collective biography of Italians who have contributed to artistic, political, scientific, religious, literary and economic history from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to today .
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