'As water flows under the bridge of time I stand with peoples locked-in memories of the past in the present until.....'
There was (is?) a trend for people to attach padlocks to a bridge fence structure to signify their love for each other, a symbol that their love will stay there for all of eternity.
They then hurl the keys to the lock into the body of water under the bridge.
Where does the tradition come from?
What is most interesting is that the love lock tradition didn’t start at the famous 'love lock' Pont des Arts bridge in Paris — it started in a town called Vrnjačka Banja in Serbia. There, shortly before the First World War, a young man and woman fell in love, and would meet every night at the Most Ljubavi bridge in town. But the man went into the military, and while abroad, he met and fell in love with someone else. The young woman died of heartbreak, and superstitious local women began going to the bridge, writing the names of themselves and their lovers on padlocks, and locking them to the bridge, in the hope that it would bind their paramours to home.
It is an almost blindingly romantic story, but the tradition petered out after the war, until Serbian poet Desanka Maksimović wrote a poem about the story, and it took off again, but still only at the Most Ljubavi.
The origin of the current wave of love lock bridges probably comes from a single Italian writer named Federico Moccia. Moccia wrote a book called I Want You that featured a couple who put a love lock on a lamp post on Rome’s 2100-year-old Ponte Milvio bridge. The book was popular, and spawned a movie adaptation, and shortly after the movie came out, the lamp post partially collapsed. People started putting their locks elsewhere on the bridge, and the Roman government began fining people 50 euros if they were caught putting love locks on the bridge.
From there, the tradition spread to Asia and the rest of Europe, eventually becoming an issue in France in 2010. We can probably thank the current explosion of love locks at least in part to Parks & Recreation, but the tradition was getting out of control before the airing of that episode. Now, all over the world, city governments are begging people to please stop weighing down their bridges with locks of love.
