Here's something I've learned from 2 years on the road - if a city has a claim to fame, however loose, they will try and milk it for all it's worth. Whether it's the Hans Christian Andersen museum in Odense, Cong's giant statue of John Wayne, or the Tolkien branding over all of New Zealand, it's true all over the world.
Yes, this small city in the north of Italy is home to the story of two teenagers who have an affair and kill themselves, and they are proud of it. As we walked from our coach to the Arena, the ancient Roman amphitheatre in the middle of the city, we passed (I swear this is true) Capulet St, Montague St, Juliet St and Montague Ave.
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| I'm surprised it hasn't been renamed the 'Mercutio Amphitheatre' or something |
All of this before we got to the city's main attraction - Juliet's balcony from the play's most iconic scene, and the statue of the heroine in the square below.
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| photo by: timeweb2001 |
Over the centuries, a tradition of sorts has sprung up around the statue - if you touch her right breast, you will find your true love. While it's entertaining to see possibly the only love ritual in the world that more guys do than girls, all I can wonder is, how did it get started?
Who was the first person to cop a feel of the statue, and decide that the course of his romantic future was set in stone then and there? I say 'his', incidentally, because c'mon. You know it was a guy who did it first. But how the hell did we get from, "a rose by any other name" to "honka honka"?
Who was the first person to cop a feel of the statue, and decide that the course of his romantic future was set in stone then and there? I say 'his', incidentally, because c'mon. You know it was a guy who did it first. But how the hell did we get from, "a rose by any other name" to "honka honka"?
Just across the square is the wall where, for hundreds of years, women have placed letters written to Juliet.
Letters wishing for love, celebrating new love, mourning lost love... but that's not what draws the crowds, oh no. Rather, every day, hundreds of people queue to grope the immortalised 14-year-old Capulet.
But let's not lose sight of the truth at the heart of the story. Let us cast off centuries of tradition and statue-molesting, and focus on the truly timeless moral of Romeo and Juliet's epic love story: Obey your parents or you and everyone you know will die.
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