A Dutch tourist was arrested for writing his name on wall of Pompeii house (Picture: Getty)
A Dutch tourist has been arrested and charged with vandalism after he was caught carving his name into an ancient Roman building near Pompeii.
The unnamed 27-year-old was detained after staff discovered graffiti on a frescoed wall in an ancient Roman villa in Herculaneum on Monday.
Police later said the graffiti, which had been made in black permanent marker, matched the Dutch tourist’s signature.
Herculaneum, an ancient Roman seaside town near Naples, was also buried alongside its more famous neighbour Pompeii by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.
The graffitti took place in a wall on an ancient Roman villa in the town of Herculaneum (Picture: Reuters)
The tourist now faces charges of damage and defacement of artistic works, the Independent reports.
‘Any damage hurts our heritage, our beauty and our identity and that is why it must be punished with the utmost firmness, Italian Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano said in a statement.
The incident occurred on Sunday at the UNESCO World Heritage Site, which saw Italy’s state-run museums and archaeological sites open for free to the public to celebrate the Festa della Repubblica national holiday.
It comes as Italian officials seek to crack down on desecration of their cultural heritage sites following a spate of graffiti-related incidents at historical landmarks in recent years.
In 2023, a 27-year-old Bulgarian fitness instructor living in the UK, was tracked down by Italian police after he was caught carving ‘Ivan + Hayley 23’ into the walls of the Colosseum in Rome.
After being informed he faced a €15,000 fine or a five-year jail term, the man wrote a bizarre letter of apology to Italian authorities in which he claimed not to know the Colosseum was an ancient structure.
Sangiuliano once again responded to the incident, after footage of the Colosseum vandal went viral, calling it a ‘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 fiancee.’
A Bulgarian tourist living in the UK was caught carving his name into Rome’s Colosseum last year (Picture: YouTube)
‘I hope that whoever did this will be identified and sanctioned according to our laws,’ he added.
A Swiss teenager was also repremanded after she was caught carving the letter ‘N’ into the ancient structure.
Two German men were also detained by the police in 2023 after they allegedly spray-painted ‘DKS 1860’ – the name of a third-division German football team- onto the 460-year-old columns of Florence’s iconic Vasari corridor.
In 2014, a Russian tourist was fined €20,000 (£17,000) and given a four-year suspended jail sentence for engraving a ‘K’ on a wall.
The following year, two American tourists were also cited for aggravated damage after they carved their names in the monument.
In response to the vandalism, Italy introduced a new law this year which would impose fines of up to 40,000 euros on those found guilty of defacing monuments.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.