A couple of American tourists have returned a piece of the Coliseum they stole 25 years ago.
Preferring to remain anonymous, the Americans couriered to the Italian police the small piece of stone they chopped off the ancient Roman landmark, taking it as a souvenir. The package, which the media reported as coming from Greensboro, in North Carolina, included a note of apology: ‘We should have done this sooner…Every time I looked at my souvenir collection and came across that piece it made me feel guilty. Over the years, I started thinking that if all the visitors to that beautiful monument took a piece of it away with them nothing would be left standing…It was a selfish and superficial act’, the note read.
Tourism and archeological officials accepted the apology and invite the couple to return to Rome. ‘The message is that visitors to our city continue to cherish it even after so many years,’ Lazio Tourism chief Claudio Mancini told reporters.
