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Damaged treasures and regulations that do not comply with regulations have highlighted the country’s fragile cultural heritage and the desire to teach visitors more.
By Elisabetta Povoledo
ROME – First, two German tourists took an unauthorized dip on the Grand Canal of Venice, under the Rialto Bridge. An Austrian tourist then broke the toe of a plaster statue of Napoleon’s sister while posing for a photo at a museum in northern Italy. After that, a French tourist was left with her hands in the dough with a black felt to immortalize her stay in Florence in the city’s famous Ponte Vecchio.
Now, the Italian government has put its attractions on a young man who took a selfie on top of recently reopened hot spring baths in Pompeii, the fragile archaeological site.
“An investigation has been opened,” said Massimo Osanna, outgoing director of the Pompeii site, adding that prosecutors in a closure around the city were aware of the facts.
The coronavirus pandemic would probably have crushed Italy’s tourism industry this year, which would be a blow to the country’s economy, but Italians say it shouldn’t give tourists coming a loose pass to get rid of the country’s cultural treasures.
“There is a question of vigilance, but also of lack of preparation for climbers,” is read in an editorial published Tuesday in the Roman newspaper La Repubblica. “What happened in Pompeii shows that the way to teach those who stop in museums is still fraught with difficulties and unforeseen events,” a nod to the countless vandalism and damage caused to cultural treasures through tourist scales. Previous attempts to curb that behavior have not been successful.
Lawmakers in the confined space of parliament last month brought a bill that would increase the consequences for those convicted of destroying Italy’s artistic heritage. The Minister of Culture, Dario Franceschini, has been looking to put such a law on the books since 2016, but has failed to obtain approval from any of the spaces in Parliament.
“We are not in the Wild West; there are legislation to damage cultural heritage,” Franceschini spokesman Mattia Morandi said Tuesday. But the minister said he hoped the harshest sentences would be a major impediment to others “who can just burn their names in the Colosseum or take mosaics of pompeii” without knowing they were destroying something invaluable, he said.
“We want to make a greater effort to teach tourists about respect for our heritage, to make them perceive where they are,” said Osanna, who must leave Pompeii next month to hold office at the Ministry of Culture guilty of monitoring Italy’s state museums.
Pompeii is a huge and difficult site to monitor, he said. “Even through the expansion of the law enforcement staff to hundreds, there will be a position that you can access without direct control.”
Rather than restricting himself to the site, Mr. Osanna said it would be better to tell visitors that they were walking on a fragile land that belonged to all mankind “and that any damage caused to the site is detrimental to the World Heritage Site. Array»
In the case of the statue whose feet were broken in July, the local government followed the guy in the museum’s visitor records. Prosecutors will read about Pompeii’s booking formula to check and adjust a call to the photo that surprised the tourist by taking selfies off limits. The incident took place on July 24, but did not make headlines in Italy until last weekend, after being posted on several social media accounts.
The guy who took the photo, Antonio Irlando, said he thought the woguy probably hadn’t known he was breaking the regulations because the rope that intended to block the brick stairs leading to the ceiling had been unleashed and thrown aside.
Irlando, architect and president of a local agreement that monitors Pompeii sites, said in an interview that after taking the photo, she tried to succeed in the woman, but she was gone when he arrived in the restrooms. Instead, he saw another circle of relatives climb the steps, unaware that they were forbidden.
“I told them it wasn’t safe,” he said. “Who, how many others have gone up and no one has noticed.”
Irlando said his database was full of “very extreme” photographs of tourists behaving badly in Pompeii, such as walking along the ancient city walls or relying on frescoes created about 2,000 years ago.
“It’s an atavic vice, ” he said. “If you need more photos of other people who trashed the site, let me know.”
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