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Damaged treasures and regulations that do not comply have highlighted the country’s fragile cultural heritage and desire to teach visitors more.
By Elisabetta Povoledo
ROME – First, two German tourists took an unauthorized dip in the Grand Canal of Venice, under the Rialto Bridge, and then an Austrian tourist broke the toe of a plaster statue of Napoleon’s sister while posing for a photo at a museum in northern Italy.that, a French tourist stood with her hands in the dough a black felt to immortalize her stay in Florence in the city’s famous Ponte Vecchio.
The Italian government has now put its attractions on a young man who took a selfie on top of some of the newly reopened baths in Pompeii, the fragile archaeological site.
“An investigation has been opened,” said Massimo Osanna, outgoing director of pompeii’s site, adding that prosecutors at a city closure 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 a lack of preparation for those who make a stopover,” says an editorial published on Tuesday in the Roman newspaper La Repubblica.plagued by difficulties and unforeseen events,” a nod to the countless episodes of vandalism and the damage caused to cultural treasures through the scales of tourists.Previous attempts to curb such behavior have not been successful.
Lawmakers in the small space of parliament brought a bill last month that would give a boost to sentences for those guilty of destroying Italy’s artistic heritage.The Minister of Culture, Dario Franceschini, has been seeking to have this law recorded in the books since 2016, but has not obtained the approval of any of the chambers of parliament.
“We are not in the Wild West; there is legislation to damage cultural heritage,” Franceschini spokesman Mattia Morandi said Tuesday.But the minister said he hoped that the harshest sentences would be a greater deterrent to others “who could simply burn their names in the Colosseum or take mosaics of Pompeii, “not knowing they were destroying something invaluable,” he said.
“We need to go to greater efforts to teach tourists to respect our heritage, to do them where they are,” said Osanna, who will leave Pompeii next month to hold a position in the Ministry of Culture in charge.to oversee Italian state museums.
Pompeii is a huge and difficult place to monitor, he said.”Even through the expansion of the corps of security workers to hundreds, there will be a position that you can access without direct control.”
Rather than limited to the site, Osanna said it would be better to tell visitors that they were walking on a fragile land that belonged to all of humanity “and that any damage caused to the site is harmful to the World Heritage Site.”
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 verify and adjust a photo call that surprised the tourist by taking selfies off limits.The incident took place on July 24, but was not news in Italy until last weekend, after being posted on various social media accounts.
The guy who took the picture, Antonio Irlando, said he thought the woguy might not have known he was breaking regulations because the rope that intended to block the brick stairs leading to the ceiling had been uncovered and thrown aside.
Irlando, architect and president of a local arrangement that monitors Pompeii sites, said in an interview that after taking the photo, he tried to succeed in the woman, but that she was gone when he arrived in the bathrooms.saw another circle of relatives climb the steps, not knowing they were forbidden.
“I told them it wasn’t safe, ” he said.” How many others have climbed 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 leaning on frescoes created about 2,000 years ago.
“It’s an atvic vice, ” he said. If you need more pictures of other people who trashed the site, let me know.”
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