Rome Carabinieri police on Saturday cited a 17-year-old German student for vandalizing the Colosseum, sources said on Sunday.
The student, who was accompanied by a teacher, was caught carving something into a wall on the ground floor of the monument.
It is the third such case in only a few weeks.
A 17-year-old Swiss girl was caught after being filmed scratching her initials into a stone at the ancient arena.
A young tourist defaced the Colosseum by carving his and his girlfriend’s name (Ivan+Haley 23) on one of the walls of the Flavian Amphitheatre with keys last month.
Some bystanders filmed the scene, which allegedly took place on 23 June, and the video ended up on social media.
The tourists risk 15,000-euro fines and imprisonment for up to five years, Italian officials have said.
In the first of these latest incidents, an outraged bystander confronted the culprit, “Are you serious, man?”, commenting to the man, who had carved ‘Ivan + Haley’ into the wall.
Gennaro Sangiuliano, Italy’s culture minister, called the man’s actions as “unworthy and a sign of great incivility,” SkyNews reported.
The excuses the vandals make are sometimes downright ludicrous. The English tourist who carved his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum, now identified by his lawyer as 27-year-old Ivan Danailov Dimitrov, has written a letter apologizing for defacing the nearly 2,000-year-old amphitheater and claimed he was unaware that the world-famous landmark was ancient.
The letter addressed to Rome Mayor Roberto Gualtieri was published in Il Messaggero, an Italian newspaper based in Rome. In the letter, the man wrote: “I admit with deepest embarrassment that it was only after what regrettably happened that I learned of the antiquity of the monument.”
Dimitrov, who could face prison time and a hefty fine, went on to say he was now “aware of the gravity of the act” while extending “my heartfelt apologies to the Italians and to the whole world for the damage done to an asset that is, in fact, the heritage of all humanity.”
Thus far there have been no other apologies from the other perps.
