Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Volume 261

With the return of kids to school, for most of us the summer, and tourist season, has come to a close. Some of our Weird and Wacky Wednesday stories are inevitably about people on vacation doing stupid things, and we tend to focus on stupid things they do in the US. Today we’d like to challenge the assertion that American tourists are the stupidest by looking at some of the horrible things people from other nations have done.

This is the Weird and Wacky Wednesday desecrating and damaging historic art and artifacts edition for 2023. Today we’re looking at stupid acts that destroyed our cumulative and combined human heritage.

Of course, colonizers damaged and destroyed antiquities, and looted them, taking them back home for collectors and for display in museums. When the US invaded Iraq, the museums were looted by Iraqis. One would imagine that the damage and theft we know about pales when compared to that which happens every day and probably happened every day before anyone was taking notes. In short, it seems we can’t have nice things and if something is nice, someone will come along to ruin it.

This week we start in Florence Italy, where a 22-year-old German tourist damaged a sculpture when he climbed it to take a photo. The sculpture is outdoors, the famous Fountain of Neptune, which is apparently in the centre of a fountain.

The tourist damaged the sculpture while climbing it, and he continued to climb it. As he climbed back down, after taking the photo, he damaged it further.

There is no information whether this was a selfie or if he had some jerk friend encouraging him. Either way, it’s an irreplicable object of our history on this planet and someone damaged it forever to take a picture.

This German tourist now has to pay €5,000 for the repair plus pay a fine.

Florence Mayor Dario Nardella posted the photo and footage of the incident on social media stating “There is no justification for ignorance and vandalism towards cultural heritage.”

On the one hand, the tourist seems to be getting off easy. On the other hand, the entire sculpture likely required complete reconstruction after WWII so one can assume it’s not the perfectly preserved artifact of antiquity.

It strikes me that Germans have a bad reputation that, in some respects, is similar to that of Americans. Of course there is the history which may affect the way we think about people from those nations.

Switzerland managed to avoid that by staying out of wars. Sure, they facilitated wars by handling war loot, stolen money and gold, but that’s not what comes to mind when you think of Switzerland. What comes to mind is a nation that failed to step up when there was a moral imperative to step up. In this regard, we all appreciate Denmark.

But focusing on the tourists here, a Swiss tourist has damaged the nation’s reputation by carving her initials in the Colosseum in Rome.

Once again this was caught on camera. Isn’t is handy that chances are someone has images of the desecration in these case?

In this case it was a 17-year old young woman who engraved an “N” on a wall of the Colosseum. An Italian guide filmed her. We hope they also stopped her.

This happened less than a month after a 27-year-old British lad defaced the Colosseum by carving his and his girlfriend’s initials into it. Yes, I am less surprized about a 27-year old British bloke than I am about a 17-year old Swiss teen.

So far, the Americans tourists are looking quite well behaved. Germans, Swiss and British are in my bad books (and in the good books Denmark is number 1 because the Danes are awesome).

What about China? How are their tourists?

Well, if it happened in China, you’ll never know if you have the true story because it’s an authoritarian state. But we do know some locals, not tourists, likely damaged the Great Wall of China.

A sculpture is there for people to enjoy the beauty found in the art. A colosseum is there to provide the people an opportunity to enjoy sport and culture (and killing in the case of Ancient Rome). A wall is a fence to keep the neighbours out.

The Romans built one right across England to keep the Scots out. Hadrian’s wall was largely destroyed centuries ago by people who took the rocks to construct their homes and enclosures for their farms to keep the sheep in. Luckily, The Great Wall of China largely still stands. But what if you’re a contractor and you need to move gravel and such things from one side to another?

If you’re a contractor and you want to get in big trouble, you put a hole in the Wall, and that’s what two people did this summer.  

Apparently a 38-year-old man and a 55-year-old woman dug through the Wall in Shanxi province to create a shortcut for their nearby construction project. There was an opening that they made larger using an excavator causing what the local police described as irreversible damage.

Does is change anything that they weren’t tourists? As I was writing this I kept thinking of when I was asked in school to write about what I did in the summer. It seemed like an opportunity for the teacher to measure my quality of life, which concerned me. I’m wondering now how the people in these cases would approach the task of explaining what they did in the summer. Oh, I damaged something that was the heritage of all humanity because I was selfish? That’s a school assignment we’re all thankful we don’t need to complete.

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