First, the moral: Cultural literacy is a life competence obligation both at home and abroad. Now the tale:
I had been planning on a post about the manhunt in Rome for the unethical tourist caught on video carving “Ivan + Hayley 23/6/23” into a brick on a wall of the Colosseum. Authorities went looking for “Ivan;” meanwhile, not only is destruction of natural and historical sites an occasional Ethics Alarms theme, but in this case the video-taker’s conduct was also questionable: he was more interested in taking a viral video than he was in stopping the vandalism.
31-year-old Ivan Danailov Dimitrov was eventually identified by Italian military police officers. They crosschecked “Ivan and Haley”with guests registered in Rome and found that the love-birds had stayed in an Airbnb rental.Then the police they tracked Dimitrov to England. Now he faces between two and five years in prison and a fine up to 15,000 euros, about $16,300.
Good.
But that’s not the best part.
Hoping to avoid prison time, Ivan wrote a letter of apology containing this classic line:
“I admit with deepest embarrassment that it was only after what regrettably happened that I learned of the monument’s antiquity.”
KABOOM!!!!
I hope they feed him to lions.
Ethics Alarms 
It’s disturbing that people’s first reaction to everything is to get video. Fights, car crashes, dead bodies (Logan Paul), and live events are now a sea of phones held above people’s heads. In this case maybe getting video to identify him was a good idea, but stopping him would have been much better.
That non-apology is really something.
Remember ..these people vote! And reproduce …
My eight-year-old grandson on first seeing pictures of the Colosseum; “PopPop, why don’t they fix that place up? It’s a mess!”
A teachable moment presents itself!
Adding vandalism is unethical. And now it must be cleaned off and the vandal punished.
Erasing 1000 year old vandalism is unethical. It should be preserved as a cultural marker of times gone by.
Where between 1000 years ago and the present day does vandalism hit the inversion point from “should be cleaned off and punished” to “should be preserved and studied”?