LETTER FROM ROME
The Italian summer is winding down, and with it the peak of a tourist season marked by a series of unseemly moments, involving foreign travelers eager to leave their mark on some of the country's most iconic architectural landmarks. The latest such incident occurred in Florence, a city of culture second to none, which woke up on August 23 to find one of its most emblematic sites defaced by graffiti.
A colonnade in the Vasari Corridor was tagged overnight. The inscriptions, with no obvious meaning, were interpreted by some as the name of a German third-division football club, TSV 1860 Munich. The site, built in 1565, links some of the city's most prominent landmarks over a distance of one kilometer. It leads from the Palazzo Vecchio to the Palazzo Pitti, via the Uffizi Gallery and the Ponte Vecchio. Two tourists from a German group were identified as the perpetrators by footage from surveillance cameras.
The Florentine incident followed a similar act in Milan on the night of August 7. Other "art vandals," as they are known in the Italian press, sprayed graffiti on the upper section of the Vittorio Emanuele II Gallery. This late 19th century building, a symbol of Italian Unification, is located in Piazza del Duomo, the city's iconic Gothic cathedral.
The two occurrences came one after the other, while another incident in Rome was still fresh in people's minds. That case involved a tourist, identified as British, who was filmed using a key to carve the inscription "Ivan + Haley 23" into a wall of the Colosseum. The images, which show the young man, undaunted, setting to work on the iconic site, have gone viral. This was the fourth time an act of this type was recorded on the premises in 2023, according to ANSA, Italy's national news agency.
All of this has generated extensive media coverage and frequent outcries from government officials and museum directors. The map of incidents follows a rough outline of the country's most beautiful sites, which of course overlaps with the route for mass tourism. Ubiquitous in the historic centers of Italian cities, some of which are truly overrun, the number of tourists in 2023 is expected to be 12.2% higher than in 2022. With a record summer season, according to projections by the Demoskopika Research Institute, Italy could even see tourism figures rise to pre-pandemic 2019 levels, right before the sector was brought to a complete standstill.
As the number of tourists picks up steam, so does the media coverage of spectacular acts of defacement. The series of vandalism cases seen this summer comes at a time when criticism is growing that "overtourism" is stretching the limits of the country's most popular destinations.
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