Terni, in central Italy’s Umbria region, seems infatuated with Valentine’s Day. Barely have the plastic Christmas igloos been packed away before heart-shaped light displays appear in the Piazza Tacito to herald February’s main event. A ten-day “Choco-lentine’s Festival” is coupled with the “Festival of the Promise,” where a bishop blesses couples engaged to be married. Beamed across the sixteenth-century Palazzo Spada are the English words “Terni in Love.”

Terni’s leaders have in recent years increasingly sought tourist dollars. Saint Valentine was born here in the third century AD, before his martyrdom one long-ago February 14. Yet Terni’s festivals and historical reenactments are not age-old, and efforts to monetize the city’s most famous son only took off in the 1990s. The basilica bears Saint Valentine’s remains, but the “city of love” brand is still struggling to overcome another identity, which left a more visible mark on the city.

Terni was from the late nineteenth century a steel town, nicknamed “the Italian Manchester.” Most jobs were somehow connected to this industry. While far from Italy’s Northern industrial triangle, Terni drew in migrants from surrounding regions, who also built its early labor movement. The Socialists reached 73 percent support here in 1920 before the Fascist takeover. Terni’s steel production was closely intertwined with the defense sector, through two world wars. But Terni became known as a left-wing “workers’ city.”