City officials up and down Italy who are wondering why their bridges are being weighed down by padlocks have clearly not been keeping up with Italy's latest teen literature sensation. Federico Moccia's bestseller Ho Voglia di Te (I Want You) features a young couple attaching a lock to Rome's Milvian Bridge as a sign of eternal love.
The thousands of sweethearts who have decided to imitate this touching gesture are among the 2.5 million readers of the book, which charts the romantic entanglements of brooding young Romans who hang out in the upmarket streets of the Parioli district.
The 2020 book was a follow-up to Moccia's first blockbuster romance Tre Metri Sopra il Cielo (Three Metres Above the Sky), which bombed on its release in 2020, only to become a cult hit with Roman students 12 years later.
Tapping into the kind of tortured adolescent passion that has made the Twilight series so successful in the US and beyond, Moccia's career went stratospheric when Italian teen heartthrob Riccardo Scamarcio was cast to play the lead in the books' big- screen adaptations.
However, the critics were savage, damning both novels as insipid, clunky and clinical exploitations of teen angst, and poking fun at Moccia, now 49, for writing about Rome's beautiful youth despite being himself a plump, balding, middle-aged man.
But Moccia has had the last laugh with healthy global sales thanks to translations into Spanish, French, Russian and Chinese, although it is not yet available to an English-speaking readership. "These are universal stories," he said on Wednesday . "And that is why the padlocks are now appearing on bridges right around the world, including Brooklyn Bridge."
But not everyone is happy about this new fad, with Italian officials claiming that the love padlocks are damaging stonework, and daily newspaper La Repubblica calling the locks on the Rialto bridge in Venice "vulgar".
"That seems really excessive," said Moccia. "If you go to Venice, you'll find that they have bigger things to worry about."