A brief 700-year history of overtourism

Tourist hordes go way back. Pilgrims in Rome likely inspired Dante when he sketched out his eighth circle of hell in the 14th century.

- Howard Chua-Eoan

In Rome, all roads seem to lead to the Trevi Fountain. On my last visit, every other time I asked Google Maps to figure out a route to sites in the historic centre of the city, the app coursed me through the tourist magnet commissioned by Pope Clement XII in the 18th century.

If I'd never seen the Trevi before, I'd be grateful. But three round trips on one day past the baroque aquatic fantasy made me rococo loco. The standing room in front of the fountain was an intake pond for tourists streaming in from all over. I was drowning in the tussle and drenched in summery sweat—not all my own. Ick and eek. And this was just the start of Rome's high season.

Foreign tourists like to complain there are too many of themselves. But the locals do too—and have horror stories to tell. A grainy CCTV video apparently shows a visitor to the crowded Uffizi Gallery in Florence awkwardly posing in front of an 18th-century portrait of a Medici heir, only to buckle a bit and tear a hole in the painting with either his hand or elbow.

Last summer, the mayor of Rome declared that "there can certainly be no space for hooligans and idiots" after a visitor allegedly used a key to carve his name into a wall of the Colosseum. The previous year, a visitor from Bristol in Britain had done the same and pleaded ignorance of the monument's antiquity.

A month ago, there were news accounts of an American tourist who impaled himself on a metal fence while trying to take a selfie at the 1,953-year-old ruin. The veracity of those reports has been questioned. For many Italians, however, it was the perfect fable of comeuppance: Foolish tourist gets punished by his own foolishness.