“I saw it delivered in the morning. A bulky package, quite heavy, carefully packed.”
So begins the story in the Italian newspaper Il Messaggero. When the package was opened, staff at the National Roman Museum discovered a “large fragment of millenary marble.”
A note was included with it: A woman admitted stealing the ancient piece of marble, apparently from the Roman Forum, during a 2017 Italian vacation.
The woman said she was sorry for being, in her own words, “such an American (expletive),” Britain’s The Independent newspaper reports. She also apologized for writing on the marble relic, which bore the message: “To Sam, love Jess, Rome 2017.”
“I feel terrible for not only stealing this artifact from its rightful place, but also for writing on it like this,” the note said, as translated from the Italian-language news report. “It was very wrong on my part and only now, as an adult, do I realize just how reckless and despicable it was to do it. I spent hours trying to remove the writing, but without success.”
The package was sent from Atlanta.
Despite the defacement of the piece, the National Roman Museum’s new director has forgiven the wayward tourist, telling Il Messaggero that the note touched him.
“It affected me precisely because she is a young woman,” Stephane Verger said. “She realized she was wrong. It is a spontaneous gesture, but the fruit of conscious reflection.”
He called the return of the item “a very important symbolic gesture.”
The unknown woman’s apology has been widely covered in Italy, which has long struggled to prevent the theft and vandalism of its historic heritage. The museum has not offered specifics about the returned marble artifact.
The open-air Roman Forum, which was used for political and legal business as well as gladiatorial combat during the ancient Roman Republic, is one of the most popular tourist sites in the world.
