June 22, 2025 \| Last updated: June 22, 2025. More for You ...

Valentine’s Day, celebrated on February 14, traces its origins to ancient Rome and the festival of Lupercalia. The holiday evolved over centuries and became associated with Saint Valentine, a ...

Lupercalia was celebrated for centuries in the middle of February, eventually transforming into a Christian celebration honoring St. Valentine as the Roman Empire became less pagan.

Valentine's Day has long been celebrated as a day of romance filled with red roses, heart-shaped candies and chocolate boxes. Here are 25 trivia facts you didn't know about Valentine's Day.

Pope Gelasius, I ended Rome's Lupercalia Day in the 5th Century. Meanwhile, Christians began to hold a feast on Feb. 14 to celebrate Saint Valentine and the sanctity of marriage.

Lupercalia was a violent, sexually charged festival celebrated in ancient Rome to promote fertility, health, and purification, which was held on 15 February each year.

At the end of the 5th century, the celebration of Lupercalia was forbidden by Pope Gelasius I, who is often attributed with replacing it with St. Valentine’s Day, according to Britannica.

The connections to the Lupercalia were invented by scholars in the 18th and 19th century to account for the romantic practices of St Valentine's day of which they did not know the origin (and I am ...

According to NPR, Lupercalia was a sacrificial ritual and festival honoring Lupa, the she-wolf who nursed and sheltered Romulus and Remus. The event was also meant to appease Lupercus, the Roman ...

Where did Valentine’s Day originate? For years, the consensus among historians was that the holiday had something to do with an ancient Roman festival called Lupercalia that fell in mid-February.