Rome (TAN): Police apprehended and fined a French tourist for swimming in the historic Piazza Santa Maria fountain in the early hours of Sunday, media reports said.
This is the latest in the series of drunken behaviour and vandalism incidents that the Italian capital administration is seeking to put a check on.
According to The Local, the 35-year-old tourist, who decided to take the dip despite the cold and rainy weather over the weekend, was fined EUR 450.
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Police are conducting regular drives to crack down on drinking and unruly behaviour on the city streets, especially in the Esquilino, Piazza Bologna, Trastevere, San Lorenza, and Roma Termini station areas.
Drinking on the streets is banned after 2100 hours in the city. Bars cannot serve alcohol between 0200 and 0700 hours.
The city administration have been working to check incidents of vandalism at its historical sites at a time the city is witnessing record number of tourists.
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Rome’s entire historic center is a Unesco World Heritage Site, the largest such urban site in the world. The Italy capital saw a record 16 million visitors in 2018.
“With the number of cultural sites and the rising number of tourists, it is impossible to reduce vandalism to zero,” Vanna Mannucci, vice-president of the Rome chapter of Italia Nostra, an advocacy group for cultural heritage, had said in February.
Mannucci said it was important for visitors to realise the monuments weren’t just part of Rome or Italy’s heritage but of the world.
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Pedro Barrajon, rector of the European University of Rome, which offers a degree in tourism and territorial protection,had told the Chinese news agency Xinhua: “The larger the number of tourists, the more likely it is that a few will play outside the rules.”
In recent years, a few tourists have been arrested for carving their names in the Colosseum and one, for trying to steal a brick from the structure. Hundreds have been arrested or fined for bathing in the Trevi Fountain and many booked for spray-painting other historical structures.
