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Okay, not to make all you
Twilight fans insanely jealous, but I spent my Valentine's Day in Volterra, Italy, the home of the Volturi vampire nobility in Stephanie Meyer's
Twilight saga.
Go ahead- envy me and my Valentine's Day. How can you help yourselves?
After all, it was here in this ancient town, where Etruscans lived 2500 years ago, where the Romans came, and the Black Death raged, that something
really important happened:
Bella saved Edward from suicide. Edward was going to expose himself as a vampire and thereby force the Volteri to kill him because he thought Bella was dead. This may sound familiar since Meyer structured the
New Moon book around the archetype of teen romance: Romeo and Juliet.
According to the tourism office here in Volterra, my family and I are hardly the only Twilight tourists. In fact, they attribute
one out of four visitors to this city as Twilighters. The Twilighters come from all over the world: the US, Canada, the UK, France, Italy, Japan, China, Jamaica, Venezuela, Brazil, and, of course, Italy itself. Although they come to see the place where Edward and Bella will always live, the tourism office hopes that the Twilighters will also appreciate this ancient city on a hill, filled with a beautiful mix of Etruscan, Roman and Medieval architecture.
Yet even if the Twilighters bother to stop by the Roman baths or the Etruscan gate, the story of Edward and Bella is so compelling, so completely thrilling and emotionally satisfying, that it is what draws "everyone" to this place. Actually, when pushed a bit further on this, the tourism office told me that
Twilight speaks primarily to couples and families and they are always heterosexual (although some gay men might visit occasionally to see the city, they do not show up for the special Twilight-themed tours).
That was certainly true tonight as an extremely lively guide took us through the streets of Volterra at sunset. We were a shy crowd, she said, difficult to warm up. There was myself, my 11-year-old daughter, and four Italian couples from other towns. The couples themselves looked similar: they were appropriately gendered, the women had long hair, the men short. They enacted appropriate gendered performances: the men took the photos or videos and insisted they had not read the books while at least a few of the women admitted they had read all the books and been very moved by them. One woman said she had cried like a fountain while reading them. One man said he was there because he loved his wife and she loved
Twilight. Ah, that's amore.
There was nothing extraordinary about these couples- looking for some romance on St. Valentine's Day. They worked as mechanics and in the computer software industry. One owned a wine store. Another was studying economics.
And yet, they clearly enjoyed standing on the place where Alice's car, a stolen yellow porsche, was stopped because it was the (fictional) festival of St. Marco, when the vampires were thrown out of the city. The couples joked and pushed at each other as we were led underground to the ancient Roman catacombs to be "fed" to the Volteri. One man took photos of his wife as she was led away by the vampires. She shouted to him to stop taking photos and save her. The man continued his photographing.
It's difficult to know what exactly is going on here in Volterra- or across the world in Forks, WA. I think, watching the couples tonight and speaking to them a bit afterwards, it is that
romance as a genre does some pretty important ideological work for couples.
The ordinary heroine, Bella, is made extraordinary by the all-consuming love of an extraordinary vampire. As some of the
Twilight graffiti said,
Forget Prince Charming. Edward, come and rescue me!"
It is also, as one young man on the tour said, the
sort of love that we all want"
Maybe many of us do long for the sort of passion Edward and Bella have, but such an all-consuming love, the sort that makes you leave your family and friends behind, to drop all interest in the world outside the couple, would be considered psychotic and even dangerous by most of us.
Still, an all-consuming passion is an ideal, something like Heaven, to be held out to us ordinary lovers as something to imagine and desire.
Finally, there are themes of "immortality" that play into an increasingly powerful fear of aging. The same cultures that tell us to Botox at twenty so we never develop a wrinkle are, not surprisingly, the same cultures most likely to be moved by
Twilight where Bella stresses about her 19th birthday marking her as "too old."
But I think what is really going on in Volterra is the
strange marriage of capitalism and romance. Romance as an ideal type always leaves us longing for something more or something different than what we have. And capitalism is there to offer us a path of consumption to fill that aching, empty place of need and desire that are left when everyday experience cannot match the beauty and passion that is Edward and Bella. Romance tourism, alabaster apples, Edward and Bella tee shirts.
The marriage of capitalism and romance is why love bites in Volterra, Italy and Forks, WA and around the world, especially today.