News - Tourist to be fined for carving family members' initials on wall of 2,000-year-old house at Pompeii

Pompeii's perfectly preserved streets and still-standing houses provide a unique opportunity to see how people lived nearly 2,000 years ago. A visit to the ancient city of Pompeii, frozen in time when it was covered by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, provides memories of a lifetime. But memories weren’t enough for one British tourist, who was caught this week engraving the initials of himself and his family into one of the city’s 2,000-year-old houses, reports CNN. The 37-year-old, who has yet to be named, is said to have made five engravings—the initials of his family and the date, August 7—with a blunt object on the wall of the House of the Vestal Virgins. Staff at the site noticed and called the police. According to Italian news agency ANSA, the man apologized, saying that he had written the initials of himself and of his two daughters to leave a sign of their visit to the site. He could be fined 10,000 to 40,000 euros. The vast site has often been victim to badly behaved tourists, who have carved their initials and stolen items since excavations began in the 1700s. In 2022, an Australian tourist even rode a moped around the ancient site. Tourists appear to be particularly badly behaved in Italy a country whose top sites tend to be art or archaeology-focused – and are therefore more fragile than most.