A Dutch tourist has defaced a frescoed wall in an ancient Roman house in Herculaneum, near Naples, damaging a building that survived the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, Italian police said on Monday.
The police statement said the 27-year-old tourist was swiftly identified after staff at the archaeological site discovered tagged graffiti writing made with a black, indelible marker pen on a white section of a painted wall.
Police said the writing was the man’s graffiti signature.
What’s funny is that we’ve learned a huge amount about Roman culture from the graffiti in Pompeii and Herculaneum.
A lot of it was just filthy stuff- https://kashgar.com.au/blogs/history/the-bawdy-graffiti-of-pompeii-and-herculaneu
But there was a lot of tamer stuff too- http://ancientgraffiti.org/Graffiti/
My favorite of all is actually, “it took 640 paces to walk back and forth between here and there ten times” because I imagine it to be some teenager’s punishment.