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Hunt on for man who carved girlfriend's name on Italy's iconic Colosseum
“Ivan + Hayley 23/6/23,” the tourist wrote on the wall last Friday with a set of keys.
Italy's culture and tourism ministers are on the lookout for a man who was seen scribbling names on the wall of the iconic Colosseum in Rome. In a video that was shared by a tourist on social media, the man was seen scribbling his and his girlfriend's name on the Colosseum wall.
“Ivan + Hayley 23/6/23,” he wrote on the brick last Friday with a set of keys.
A fellow tourist, Ryan Lutz, of Orange, California, filmed the incident and posted the video on YouTube and Reddit. Lutz told the Associated Press that he took out his phone to film the man because he was so shocked at what he was doing.
“And as you see in the video, I kind of approach him and ask him, dumbfounded at this point, ‘Are you serious? Are you really serious?’" Lutz recalled. “And all he could do is like smile at me.”
Italy's minister of culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano, called the writing carved into the almost 2,000-year-old Flavian Amphitheatre “serious, undignified and a sign of great incivility.”
He said he hoped the culprits would be found “and punished according to our laws.”
“I consider it very serious, unworthy and a sign of great incivility that a tourist defaces one of the most famous places in the world, the Colosseum, to engrave the name of his fiancée. I hope that whoever did this will be identified and sanctioned according to our laws,” he said in a tweet in Italian.
This is the fourth time that the monument was defaced this year, according to Italian news agency ANSA. In 2014, a Russian tourist was fined 20,000 euros ($25,000) and received a four-year jail sentence for engraving a big letter ‘K’ on a wall of the Colosseum.
(With inputs from AP)
