Against the background of a sharp increase in tourist flows to Europe, the old continent is experiencing more and more unpleasant incidents involving guests from the U.S. and Britain, reports CBS News. According to the channel, vandalism and hooliganism of tourists cause an angry reaction not only from ordinary Europeans, but also from officials, who are now demanding stricter laws against overseas visitors.
Summer tourist traffic is surging across Europe – and meanwhile, Paris prosecutors announced this week that two drunken Americans failed to leave the Eiffel Tower before closing time and were forced to spend the night there. And just a few days later, another man climbed to the top of the tower and jumped from it, revealing a parachute.
These events are part of a string of incidents now being reported across the European continent, and officials are now calling for tourists to be held accountable because of them. Reporting from Rome is Chris Livesay.
In 1960, an elegant episode involving bathing in Rome’s Trevi Fountain was featured in Fellini’s “The Sweet Life”…
SYLVIA, a character in the movie “The Sweet Life”: Marcello, come here!
…and in 2023, this woman climbed the baroque masterpiece and wanted to fill a bottle of water. She was eventually taken away by the police.
CHRIS LIVSEY, CBS News correspondent: Of the roughly 1,000 tourists who come to the Trevi Fountain every hour, someone is going to turn out to be a lousy sheep – but this year, it seems to be everywhere, all over the city, all over the country and all over Europe.
Here’s a British tourist using a wrench to scratch the names of himself and his girlfriend on the walls of the Colosseum…
VOICEOVER: Man, are you serious right now?
…shocking eyewitnesses. In Venice, another British visitor, ignoring warnings, jumps five stories into a canal, landing flat on the water.
And in Spain, locals have started scaring away tourists by putting up signs on beaches warning of dangers that don’t really exist, such as rockfalls and jellyfish.
And it’s not just that tourists are misbehaving – there are also a lot more of them: 55% more of them come from the USA alone compared to last summer.
It’s time for European governments to tighten the screws, says Italy’s Tourism Minister Daniela Santanque.
“These tourists are vandals because they have no respect for our cultural heritage, which belongs not only to Italy but to the whole world,” she says, commenting on a proposed bill with a very simple idea: if you break it, you pay for it.
For now, the strong growth in tourist traffic is making life unbearable for locals, admits Lucrezia Misery, a graduate student from Rome.
CHRIS LIVESEY: You’re a proud resident of Rome; what are your feelings when you see tourists vandalizing your city?
LUCREZIA MISERI: It makes me very angry, because Rome is a very ancient city and you can’t do whatever you want when you arrive.
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