Tourist caught carving initials into Colosseum
Visitor was spotted by security staff
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Your support makes all the difference.A tourist in Rome was caught carving his initials into the Colosseum.
The 32-year-old Irishman was charged by Italian police after being spotted using a sharp object to deface the 1,950-year-old landmark.
Security staff at the Colosseum Archaeological Park saw the unnamed man etching his name into the stone on the first level and notified the carabinieri, reports Italian newspaper La Repubblica.
Italian police were called to the scene and reportedly charged the tourist with damaging assets of historical and cultural importance.
It’s not clear what the penalty in this instance will be but in the past, a Russian tourist was fined €20,000 (£16,000) and received a four-year suspended sentence for carving a giant letter ‘K’ into the walls of the Colosseum.
The 42-year-old tourist was using a pointed stone to scratch the 10-inch tall letter onto a wall of the Colosseum when a guard found him defacing the structure.
There have also been several other instances of tourists defacing the landmark.
In March 2015, two American women were also caught carving their names into the Colosseum.
Aged 21 and 25, the two Californians strayed from their tour group to scratch their initials into a wall using a coin, before taking a selfie to commemorate the vandalism.
They too were caught and charged by Italian police.
“There’s a difference in perception,” a spokesman for the Special Superintendency for the Archaeological Heritage of Rome said at the time.
“Museums are treated like churches, sacred places where there are things of great value. Whereas the Colosseum is an incomplete building which has already been robbed.”
And in July the same year, a 22-year-old Lebanese tourist was charged for the same offence.
Security guards caught the woman as she used a coin to carve ‘HA’ into a pillar at the tourist attraction.
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