St Valentine's head is in central Italy but other bits of the lovers' saint are further south, sparking competition for couples' favours. Terni, the saint's reputed birthplace, has long had the edge with its chunk of cranium, set in a silver mask showing
an artist's impression of his benign features.
The Umbrian city draws droves of lovers each year, dying to swear undying passion in his cathedral.
That means Terni enjoys a tidy trade in all the trappings of love.
Now Belvedere Marittimo in Calabria, which also claims to have some of the saint's remains, is keen to get a piece of the action. The bones and blood kept in a local abbey could be a goldmine for the seaside town, Belvedere's mayor, Mauro D'Aprile, said on Monday.
D'Aprile said he had asked the town's craftsmen to turn their hands to "anything to do with love."
He's also set up the town's first San Valentino Festival, calling for poems, SMS's and other tributes to the
saint the town claims as its own. The abbey has had the relics for almost 300 years.
Engaged couples have been flocking there since 1710 to put their prospects of married bliss in the saint's hands.
Terni, by contrast, was without its relic for 24 years after party-pooping thieves snatched the bit of skull - a day after St Valentine's Day 1979.
But the head-bone's absence hardly put a dent in the Valentine business, which has gone from strength to strength. Terni and Belvedere aren't the only Italian shrines to love.
Couples also flock each year to the small Sardinian town of Sadali near Nuoro to ask the saint to look kindly on them and bless engagements. The ritual has been going on for centuries in the town's 15th-century church, only the second in Italy - after Terni - to be devoted to St.Valentine.
In local dialect the saint is affectionately known as Su Coiadori ("he who betrothes") and many of the couples expect their pilgrimage to bless their marriage ("coias" in dialect).
As well as saintly enterprises Italy boasts other romantic rites for St Valentine's Day.
The small southern town of Vico del Gargano, for instance, has a 300-year-old tradition of garlanding its lovers' lane for couples to cuddle and exchange love's promises.
Other places - like Leonardo da Vinci's birthplace in Tuscany - have a more practical bent.
Vinci council has turned their sports centre's carpark, popular with courting couples, into a Love Park with dim lighting and handy receptacles for litter left by love-making.
St. Valentine is the designation of several saints, the most prominent of whom are two martyrs whose feasts are celebrated on February 14 because they seem to have died on that day in 270 AD. One was a priest who died in Rome, and the other the bishop of Terni, then known as Interamna.
The custom of sending Valentines or love-tokens, usually anonymous, to one's beloved probably had only an accidental connection with St.Valentine.
It is believed to owe its origin to the medieval belief, held generally in France and England, that birds began to mate at the start of the second fortnight of the second month.
