Imagine it was your job to protect objects of great value that are considered national
treasures.
Day after day you witness hordes of tourists getting off the bus and rushing towards the
place where you work.
Some of those guys are half-baked from afternoon drinking, and time after time you have to
tell people, “Don’t touch”, “That’s not a toy”, “Get down from there”, “For
God’s sake be careful.”
Half the time they don’t understand you because they don’t speak your language.
Thankfully, no one on your watch has ever destroyed anything, but you are well aware
that tourists have been walking disasters in other countries.
We’ll look at some of those things to today, starting the least expensive things damaged
and then moving onto the most expensive things.
To start, Italy has had lots of problems of late with tourists doing very silly things,
but we think the idiots abroad award goes to a couple from California.
In 2015 it was reported they’d visited Rome’s Coliseum, but they weren’t happy just looking
at things.
The couple decided to carve their initials into a wall of the coliseum and then pose
with those initials for a selfie.
Ok, so we can’t put a price on this one, but we can say the act cost the reputation
of Americans quite a lot.
What’s more, when the two women were asked if they didn’t think that carving an initial
into something over 2000 years old was bad, they said they didn’t think it was such
a big deal.
It was, and they were both charged with “aggravated damage to a building of historical and artistic
interest.”
For the rest of you out there, when you one day finally go visit that ancient place, you
might also get to see a “J” and an “N”.
Possibly the oldest artifact damaged by a tourist was something inside Luxor Temple
that dates back 3,500 years.
A 15-year old Chinese kid had seen the ancient image of a man holding a spear and he decided
that he too wanted to go down in history.
He scribbled on the image in large letters, “Ding Jinhao was here.”
That’s the English translation.
Another Chinese tourist saw this, but was too late to stop the kid.
He later wrote on a Chinese social network, “The saddest moment in Egypt.
I'm so embarrassed that I want to hide myself.
I said to the Egyptian tour guide, 'I'm really sorry.”
The parents of the boy issued a statement, saying, “We want to apologize to the Egyptian
people and to people who have paid attention to this case across China.”
The kid was a national disgrace, and he became one person in a long line of Chinese people
accused of behaving badly when abroad.
It seems the damage could be undone, so again, it was not that costly.
This next one was reported by Newsweek in 2019, and while we can’t really put a price
on the damage, we can say the act was pretty much as dumb as you can get.
It involved a photo that turned up on Instagram which showed a couple standing in front of
a sandstorm formation in Illinois.
The formation is over 400 million years old, and it was reported that the place was an
important meeting site for native Americans for around 8,000 years.
In the photo a couple have scribbled their initials on the formation, which is next to
a love heart.
We expect that this vandalism could be cleaned up for a minimal cost.
NBC news wrote this about the next one in 2013, “An American tourist in Italy has
generated shock and outrage by snapping the finger off a 600-year-old statue at a museum
in Florence.”
The news reports that a 55-year old American man had seen a statue of the Virgin Mary.
This was made by a 15th-century sculptor named Giovanni d'Ambrogio and it is considered a
priceless work of art.
The man, from Missouri, had wanted to high five Mary.
The cost of fixing the finger was not published, but since it was just a finger we doubt the
cost was high.
Let’s just say it was likely a cheap fix.
Before any Italians out there start criticizing Americans, we will tell you that in 2014 an
Italian was visiting a museum in Milan and he took a selfie with a sculpture known as
the, “Drunken Satyr.”
The sculpture ended up losing a limb.
The good news is that this was only a copy of a well-known ancient Greek sculpture, but
the bad news is that it was an expensive and remarkable copy that dates back to the 19th
century.
Christies estimated the value of an object like this one to be just 7-$10,000.
Looking at the damage, we would think it could have been fixed, although it would have taken
some time and expertise.
Next we have one way to get rid of a King.
In 2016 a man was in Lisbon, Portugal, and he thought it would be a good idea to climb
onto a pedestal to get a photo with the statue of the former king Dom Sebastiao.
He did just that, and the king came crashing down.
It was smashed to pieces.
The guy tried to escape but he was apprehended.
The media didn’t state what fixing the statue would cost, but seeing a it was smashed to
pieces we can say it will never be the same again.
This next one is another act of senseless violence and this time committed by a man
touring his own country.
It happened in a cave in southwest China in 2017 and the act was caught on video.
A young guy can be seen taking three kicks at a stalagmite.
On the third kick the thing snaps.
He then just walks away, so he wasn’t even trying to steal it.
There might not be a price you can put on this, but it appalled some people in China.
They said these things can take many, many thousands of years to get to that point, maybe
even hundreds of thousands.
Then some guy just decides to take his anger out on one.
Some of the Chinese public said he needed to be arrested and banned from ever entering
a national attraction again.
From what we can see he was never arrested.
In this case the stalagmite was appraised so that the man could be charged and made
to pay some compensation, but the media doesn’t state what value they put on the object.
Then there’s the case of a British man who was visiting a museum in 2006 and had a bit
of a comedy moment, as well as an expensive one.
The Guardian explained that his shoelace was undone and that tripped him up, but there
was nothing for him to grab a hold of.
He was actually coming down some stairs.
It seems then he just went flying, and he ended up hitting three Chinese Qing dynasty
vases worth around $120,000.
He explained to The Guardian, “Although I knew the vase would break I didn't imagine
it would be loose and crash into the other two.
I'm sure I only hit the first one and that must have flown across the windowsill and
hit the next one, which then hit the other, like a set of dominos.”
He actually got banned from the museum, which seems a bit harsh considering a rogue shoelace
was to blame.
The guy admitted that what had taken place could have been right out of some old British
slapstick comedy movie.
Not to be outdone by the Brits, this is the story of an Australian man named Laszlo Toth
who was likely suffering from a mental illness when in 1972 he went to St. Peter's Basilica
in Vatican City and attacked Michelangelo's Pietà statue with a hammer.
He hit the thing 15 times while shouting, “I am Jesus Christ — risen from the dead.”
The man was 33 at the time, which is the age that Jesus is thought to have died.
He wasn’t charged with a crime and instead spent a bit of time talking about resurrection
to Italian psychiatrists.
One guy wrote that he knew Laszlo and he said besides the fact he read his bible more than
most people read bibles, he seemed totally fine.
The guy wrote, “At the time we were room-mates, he didn't strike me as a Jesus Christ impersonator,
and he never talked to me of such things.
We spent much of our days drinking coffee, going to parties at night and drinking beer
and wine, and Lazlo often played his guitar.”
Others wrote that once he returned to Australia he led a very quiet life.
The good news about this act of vandalism is that when restorers were trying to put
the statue back together they discovered a secret signature written by Michelangelo.
We don’t know the cost of fixing the damage, but it took a lot of people with a lot of
skill, a lot of time.
The New York Times wrote that the statue was insured in 1964 for $10 million, which in
today’s money is about $81 million.
The New York Times wrote in 2017 that perhaps one woman could claim a place in the selfie
hall of infamy after destroying part of an art installation in Los Angeles.
We’ve seen the video online, and this woman is trying to take a selfie at the side of
lots of columns.
On each column lies a crown, which is part of the artwork.
She leans back against one column which is first in a long row of columns.
You can guess what happens next.
She knocks over that column, but then the rest of them all fall like dominoes.
The British artist was contacted by the Times and he said it was not staged like some people
had said it was.
It looks so funny a person might think it was staged.
He said, “Crowns are fragile things.
They are symbols of power.
Perhaps it’s ironic and meaningful that they fell.”
It’s thought that the woman caused about $200,000 worth of damage.
Then we found this headline from 2015, “Selfie-Taker Smashes Priceless Historic Italian Statue
of Hercules.”
Yep, priceless, and destroyed by someone who was looking for likes on social media.
We should note that when people say priceless, they mean a value shouldn’t be out on the
object because it meant so much.
You can look at a value put on some similar objects by the auctioning house, Chtisties,
and they might sell for as much as $250,000.
We don’t know where the tourist came from, but we read that the statue was considered
one of the jewels of an Italian city called Cremona.
The tourist climbed on top of it and it fell.
The entire thing smashed to pieces.
That statue had been around since 1700, but it was no match for a selfie taker.
The BBC reported in 2014 that tourists had tied so many locks to the Pont des Arts in
Paris, that part of the bridge had collapsed.
If you didn’t know, tourists might do that in the name of romance.
But over a million locks weighs a lot, and part of the bridge just came down.
So this one was a combined effort by people from all over the world.
We are not sure how much it cost to fix the broken part of the bridge, but we imagine
it wasn’t cheap.
It cost over $600,000 to add some new additions to the bridge, so you we might estimate the
damage overall to be above one million.
Next is the story of another person that tripped and caused a lot of damage.
It involved a boy who’d gone to visit an exhibition of Italian masterpieces in Taiwan.
The 12-year old kid, who was a little on the heavy side, was not looking where he was going.
He was walking along and it seems he was listening to the group leader, only he didn’t notice
a table.
When he hit that table he fell forward, and then he stuck out one hand.
The funny thing is, if you watch the video he kind of gets up and looks around to see
if anyone has seen what he’s done.
That hand went into a painting.
It was called Flowers and was painted by an Italian master called Paolo Porpora.
According to reports, this one was very special ‘cos it was the only one he signed.
It was worth over $1.5 million.
The painting was insured, but the museum said the damage was so bad it might not be possible
to restore it.
That’s one and a half million for not paying attention.
European football hooligans have over the years marched into cities and made a mess.
They have destroyed cafes, bars, stores, and at the same time left a lot of blood on the
streets.
You could say these guys are not tourists, but along with their game of soccer they usually
enjoy some beers and foreign food.
We say enjoy, but their actions are often considered hair-brained and dangerous.
One of the worst things they have done happened in 2017 when 7,000 Dutch fans arrived for
a game in Rome.
They got very drunk and just started smashing things up.
That’s not unusual, but this time they picked on one of the city’s most famous fountains.
This is the “Fontana della Barcaccia” and it was built in 1627.
They even urinated on the thing after they smashed parts of it.
The fountain needed a lot of restoration after that, and the cost of all this was over three
million dollars.
23 Dutch fans were arrested.
The game ended 1-1.
And finally in 2012, one man did something which shocked not just the art world but the
world in general.
He punched a whole right through a painting considered a masterpiece.
The man’s name is Andrew Shannon and the painting he decided to take a swipe at was
Claude Monet’s “Argenteuil Basin with a Single Sailboat.”
This painting had a value of around $10 million.
Ok, so the guy might not have considered himself a tourist since the painting was in an Irish
gallery and he was Irish, but then again he might have been what’s called a domestic
tourist.
Why did he do it?
There seems to be no clear reason.
Some reports state that he did it to “get back at the state”, whatever that means.
But other reports state that the guy was not feeling right in his head when he landed what
might be the most expensive punch of all time.
He didn’t just make a dent either, he punched right through the thing.
He was sentenced to five years in prison after that, and so you might consider this flash
of anger totally stupid.
It turned out that this guy was a bit of a crook and had handled lots of stolen goods
in the past, including paintings and antiques.
What would you do if you found you suddenly put your fist through a priceless work of
art?
Try to tape it up?
Blame it on your little brother?
Tell us in the comments.
Now go watch “Why Are Rolex Watches So Expensive?”
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