Tourist selfies threaten artwork in Europe's museums

It is another summer of European selfie snafus.

- Amelia Nierenberg

LONDON - It is another summer of European selfie snafus.

On June 21, a visitor to the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, Italy, stepped backwards into a painting while trying to pose like its subject, Ferdinando de' Medici, a 17th-century grand prince and patron of the arts.

For the Uffizi's director, that was the last straw, and he is not alone in his frustration.

This spring, in the Palazzo Maffei in Verona, Italy, a visitor broke a chair covered in Swarovski crystals. This, too, was the result of a snapshot gone wrong: A man apparently waited for the guards to leave before posing, in an ill-fated attempt at squatting.

And in June, the staff at the Louvre Museum in Paris went on an unauthorized strike to protest, in part, overcrowding and the headaches caused by selfie-taking tourists.

"The problem of visitors who come to museums to make memes or take selfies for social media is rampant," the Uffizi's director Simone Verde said in a statement.