Originally published at: Idiot carves his and his girlfriend's initials into the Roman Colosseum (video) | Boing Boing
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Lions do the sanctioning in the Colosseum, no?
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Not to encourage further defacement, but can’t that concrete self-heal with water and time?
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I don’t remember specifically about the Colosseum (it’s been almost 30 years since I saw it in person), but I know from at least some of the ancient sides I’ve seen that graffiti is hardly a new phenomenon. Some of these sites have some pretty old crap carved into them.
That still doesn’t excuse this yahoo, though.
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Byron clearly didn’t use a key to inscribe his – very nice letterforms, considering!
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“Romanes eunt domus” would have just gotten him a lecture.
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“Help us identify this vandal! Also, we will conceal his identity to comply with European privacy rules!”
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Vandal? With a name like Ivan, I’d look a little more East. 
Seriously though, who the fuck does that?
The only difference is the dumbass recording his “exploit” 
That’s regarding the crystals that give concrete their internal structure. Anything chipped away from the surface is gone. Plus, the coliseum is stone and mortar, so only the mortar would have these properties (assuming it’s the same mixture they used in their other engineering projects). This dipshit is carving into the stone.
Yeah, the upside is he probably only got a few microns deep and removing it won’t seriously impact the stone. I hope he has to buy a new ignition after he ruins it with the grit he scraped off onto his key.
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Honestly, I kind of love graffiti. We’ve found a bunch left from the ancient world, and it is shocking how much of it is literally stuff left by ancient Greco-Romans saying “Joe was here”, “For a good time see Sally”, “Frank has a tiny penis”.
I don’t know why, exactly, but it just gives me a humbling sense of humanity to know that after thousands of years we’re still leaving fart jokes and love letters for future generations to randomly come across.
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Nor are you Hafdan the Viking
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Well, he was in rome, just doing as the old romans did.
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right?!
if they’d just carved a big cock-n-balls alongside, it might have gone unnoticed.
them rotten romans and their phallic graffiti!
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For the clicks!
You know. I am with you.
Give it a few hundred years and its interesting history.
But do it right now and it is vandalism.
Obligatory graffiti reference.
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A lot of the 18th and 19th century graffiti on gothic cathedrals I have seen actually has serifs!
I’d always wondered about that until one day I heard in Strasbourg that the local stonemasons there would actually hire out their services to tourists to carve their names into the cathedral.
ETA: I assume Byron also didn’t carve his own signature. It was the style at the time that local labourers would do everything for the gentleman on Grand Tour. Even someone as wild and romantic as Byron.
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