Tourist damages a 200-year-old sculpture in Italy museum after sitting on it for a photograph

And that’s the reason why tourists are strictly banned at some places! In an extremely disappointing event, a tourist has snapped off three toes of a 200-year-old famous sculpture made by Antonio Canova. The unpleasant accident happened at the Gypsotheca Antonio Canova museum in Possagno, Italy, on the last day of July. The tourist has been identified as Austrian man on a trip to Italy but his name hasn’t been disclosed.

The incident
In the CCTV footage released by the Italian Carabinieri military police, the man can be seen leaning on Paolina Borghese Bonaparte as Venus Victrix to get a picture clicked. After getting the picture, he gets up and accidentally snaps off part of the sculpture’s foot. In the footage, the man can also be seen examining the damage but leaving the room casually as if nothing happened.

The statement released by the museum read, “A few minutes later our room guards detected the damage and raised the alarm. An emergency situation was immediately declared.”
The police later verified that three toes of the famous sculpture were severely damaged. According to the Italian police, the man was a part of a group of eight Austrian tourists. Not only this, the man is the husband of the woman who organised the trip.

Oops! CCTV camera captures the moment a tourist snapped the toes off a Canova sculpture in Italy pic.twitter.com/KgJxsiUHD6

— Reuters (@Reuters) August 5, 2020

The man confessed to the crime and was extremely upset and called it a "stupid move". A Treviso court has decided to charge the man for the damage but the court has not yet decided how much to charge him.

The museum, on its social media page, said that the pieces of the sculpture were found but the cast could be restored. So, the museum is now discussing the artwork’s future restoration in the next few weeks.

A similar incident happened in 2018, when a woman damaged two artworks at a gallery in Yekaterinburg, Russia, while taking a selfie. Last month, a kid at a museum in Hong Kong knocked off the glass replica of a Disney castle worth millions of dollars.