A few words, on the wall
People have been writing a few words of love on walls for at least two thousand years.
When Vesuvius buried Pompeii in 79 AD, it also preserved thousands of messages scratched into the town’s plaster. Many are election notices, jokes and insults. A good number are about love. One, scratched on a wall in the house of a banker named Caecilius Iucundus, reads: “Whoever loves, let them flourish. Let whoever does not know how to love perish. Let whoever forbids love perish twice over.” The same lines turn up in other graffiti across the town, so it seems to have been a popular verse. Nobody knows who wrote it.
The habit never stopped. In Verona, visitors to the house said to be Juliet’s stuck so many notes to the entrance walls, often with chewing gum, that in 2012 the city brought in fines of up to €500 and put up removable panels for messages instead. Volunteers in the city still answer the letters people send to Juliet, around 50,000 a year. In Paris, the padlocks couples fixed to the Pont des Arts grew so heavy that part of the railing gave way in 2014. The next year the city cut off close to a million locks, weighing about 45 tonnes. In Montmartre, a wall of dark blue tiles made in 2000 carries “I love you” 311 times in 250 languages, and people still come to stand in front of it.
Walls keep attracting these messages because of what a wall does to words. A text or a letter goes to one person. Something written on a wall is witnessed. People have always used witnesses for the things they most want to be true, which is why wedding vows are said in front of a room and eulogies are read aloud. A sentence that strangers can see has been said in public, and that gives it a weight a private message does not have.
Walls also keep the words short. There is only so much room, and only so long anyone stands reading. That limit turns out to suit love quite well. The verse from Pompeii is three short lines. Many of the notes in Verona were just two names. When there is only room for a few words, the writer has to decide which ones are true.
The people who scratched those words in Pompeii are long gone, and nobody knows who they were writing for. The words have lasted two thousand years, because someone put them somewhere that would last.