Love For Sale, Part 2: Crime & Self-recrimination

Someone should really stop them

I headed back to the Accademia Bridge late yesterday afternoon, still not quite believing--in spite of ample ugly evidence to the contrary--that the lock-selling business could be lucrative enough to support the three vendors I saw doing it on Wednesday.

I arrived to find no fewer than six of them plying the trade yesterday, and I'd barely began to absorb that number--an even half dozen!--when one of them actually made a sale.

What would vandals be without their indelible markers?

"Ten?" I heard a man respond incredulously to one of the salesmen's approach and I expected that he and his sweetheart would continue on their way. But whatever the salesman countered--which I didn't hear--stopped the two lovebirds in their tracks.

Now I was incredulous: How could they? Why would they? And while the business transaction moved quickly and furtively along I shot photos (also furtively), still not believing for some reason that those two tourists who, after all, looked sensible enough, would go through with something so-- Well, you fill in the blank. 

They took the marker, they stepped to the rail a few feet from me; I held the camera at arms length out over the canal and blindly snapped another pic, still not really believing that they'd actually attach that large lock to the bridge--and now also beginning to wonder vaguely, Should I stop them?

If I tried to intervene should I be indignant, should I step in as a representative of The Law and tell them it was illegal? Was it illegal, the lock-attaching part? I wasn't actually sure. Should I speak in Italian? English? I thought they were now speaking French but I couldn't hear them well enough to really know. Should I explain how ugly the damn things were? Wasn't that obvious?

Should I ask them if Venice was their only stop on this vacation or, like the Huns before them, were they planning to vandalize other cities as well?

No, I could simply talk to them as one rational person to two other rational people... unless, really, it was none of my business.

Perhaps it was none of my business... I did nothing, believing up to and even beyond the moment they attached the lock that they wouldn't attach the lock.

And, yes, as Susie remarked in her comment on the original post, they then threw the keys into the canal. I should at least have stopped that.  

I left the bridge after that and walked around, took some more photos, and grew more convinced that I really should have said something to them. I could have been polite about it. I didn't need to address them as gli asinini (to use that favorite term of the original Pinocchio) which part of me believed them to be acting like.

And so I learned that there were six men selling locks on that bridge for a reason, and that business, obviously, is not bad at all. And that, yes, it's disappointing sometimes the dumb things that people will do. But more troubling to me, finally, was what I didn't do.

For Part 1 on this topic: http://veneziablog.blogspot.it/2013/03/love-for-sale-accademia-bridge-this.html

And for other posts on the same subject: http://veneziablog.blogspot.it/2013/05/love-for-sale-revisited.html

http://veneziablog.blogspot.it/2013/12/v-is-for-vandal-on-accademia-bridge.html

And for the eventual solution to this problem: http://veneziablog.blogspot.it/2014/11/the-end-of-romance-on-accademia-bridge.html

The hard sell--but it didn't work

Hard bargainers: the boy didn't get the deal he wanted and walked off empty-handed