Drinking from the waters of the Canaletes fountain on the Rambla, throwing coins into the Trevi fountain, and touching the plaque on the statue of St. John Nepomuk on the Charles Bridge are supposed to ensure that you will one day return to Barcelona, Rome, and Prague, respectively. Are there other similar superstitions in other cities, and is it meaningful that analogous superstitions should exist in three European cities (other than that all three have lively tourist industries)? How far back can the existence of these superstitions be dated?
A similar one (but not exactly the same) is the Bächle legend in Freiburg, Germany. The bächle are these streams that run in the streets of old town Freiburg. Legend is that is you accidentally step in one, you will marry a Freiburger. I would assume that this would probably ensure a return to that particular city, too.
I recently moved to California from the small town of Alamosa, Colorado, in the San Luis Valley. When I first visited there for a year in AmeriCorps, I was told that the Valley, now a desert, had once been filled with water and wetlands and inhabited by frogs. When the climate changed, the frogs died, but their spirits remained, and whenever someone new comes and lives in the Valley, one of the frog spirits jumps onto their back (or into their heart, depending on who’s telling the story) and lives there. If that person ever moves away from the Valley for too long, the frog will become homesick and croak at the person to make them return. As a result, anyone who lives in the Valley and leaves will always seek to return.
I chose Alamosa as my AmeriCorps site partly because I’d heard that many people who did ended up staying or returning, so I figured it couldn’t be too bad a place. When I got there, I decided that it was, in fact, not too bad, but wasn’t any place I’d ever want to call home. I still remember the day I left looking out the window of the car and thinking, for the first time, that maybe I would want to come back some time. About three years later, I went through a horrible bout of depression and decided that if I didn’t do something radical I’d kill myself. I thought about what I could possibly do, and decided that I would return to Alamosa where, if I couldn’t find work, I’d at least be able to stay at the homeless shelter where I’d done my AmeriCorps service. (I’d left on very good terms, so I had some reason to believe that they, in fact, would hire me.) The next day I took what I had with me in a backpack and started hitchhiking to Alamosa from Little Rock, where I had been visiting my Dad for a long weekend. I ended up spending about five years there and was never depressed.
Supposedly, tapping the bell inside San Miguel Mission, the oldest church in the US, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with the small hammer provided ensures you will return. Or so one of the friars told me.
The Porcellino in Florence Italy: A copy of a copy of the original Hellenistic wild boar at the Mercado Nuovo. Rub his nose and you will return to Firenze!
(is there a way to link a picture?)
When I was in Paris, they said to step here if you wanted to return. I think it’s outside Notre Dame.
Damnit! The OP stole mine! :mad:
Since you did, I’m just bringing a bunch of negative datapoints: I don’t know of any other similar superstitions in Spain (doesn’t mean there aren’t any, of course).
Note that, while tourism is a very recent invention, the European towns cited so far have all been commerce centers for a very long time. I can see someone who’s about to leave on a trip that may last years and involve bandits and war zones wanting to do everything in his power to ensure a safe return. These remind me of stories about footballers who always wear the same undershirt after scoring in two matches in which they had it on - some people went on a trip, one used to drink from Canaletas (simply because he was from what was “uptown” back then), the others didn’t (they lived closer to the shore), only the first one returned…
Here in Olympia, there’s a public well (well,a pipe sticking out of the ground in the middle of a parking lot, anyway) from which flows the naturally pressurized artesian water the city is famous for. Drinking it is supposed to guarantee either that you’ll return to Olympia, or that you’ll never leave.
There is a statue of Magellan in Punta Arenas, Chile. Magellan himself to too high to reach, but if you rub the foot of one of the figures beneath him (representing a South American native, I think), it means you will return to the city some day.
Why you would want to go back to Punta Arenas is not explained.
They don’t show up in the standard collections of superstitions, at least not Brand or Opie and two or three others I checked, which suggests that (1) they’re not that old or (2) the compilers didn’t think about them. I would be surprised if they predated the period where tourism became common, so maybe 200 years. For some of them (e.g. coins in Trevi in Rome) an older custom may have gotten a new superstition added on.
Most of the ones listed in the thread would be classed as variants of the same superstition: (Touching, rubbing, leaving an object in/at, interacting with) (famous statue/landmark/natural feature/object) at X will ensure a return to X.
The inverse is better studied: don’t take something away from place X, or you will have bad luck / be cursed.
That’s the superstition at Chaco Canyon, a major Anasazi site in New Mexico. I recall a display in the visitor center of artifacts, potsherds mostly, sent back along with notes from the senders detailing their bad luck and how sorry they were for having took the stuff.
Yes, that’s common. There’s a place in Hawai’i, too. The notes people send with the details of their “curse” / spell of bad luck are fun reading.
Man, I was even in Florence and I forgot that one.
I heard a version of that relating to the Swedish royal ship Vasa, which sank less than a nautical mile into her maiden voyage, of people keeping slivers of her timbers, being barraged with awful luck, and contritely mailing the slivers back in hopes they would be saved further distress.
Oddly enough, New Yorkers say the only thing that will assure you coming back is moving out.
Several people have mentioned tourism. Is it just possible that many of these return myths are spread by the local tourist board? Repeat tourism creates a lot of jobs for local folk.
In folklore studies, they’re not myths, they’re superstitions. Myths are stories, while superstitions are a certain kind of belief. The stories attached to superstitions, where present, are legends. (I know I’m a broken record on this, but it’s like confusing “virus” and “bacteria”—fine in ordinary speech, but the distinction is actually quite important.)
But yes, they are spread informally (oral communication between tourists), through mass media (guidebooks, postcards, travel documentaries), and officially (tourist boards, tour guides). Most of that is probably just reporting something interesting, but sometimes it’s deliberately revived or packaged or even created out of nothing: in that case it’s called folklorismus.
Drinking water from the Nile in Cairo will do that, too, but not the way most people want it.
According to local lore, if you drink from Matrimony Springs near Moab, Utah, you’ll be spiritually wedded to the Canyonlands and destined to return. (The Utah Health Department tried to close the spring down in 2008, but people still fill up their water jugs there every day.)
Yes, I am aware of the etymology from Greek via Latin, but in the speech of normal folks, such matters are myths.
You are describing a prescriptive and limited jargon meaning of a word, which is valid in a narrow speciality. You are fully entitled to use that meaning when studying folklore, if you wish.