Summer of shame: is social media to blame or have we always been brats abroad?

They came, they saw, they... dived into canals and scrawled on ancient monuments. Instagram and TikTok have showcased a summer of scandalous behaviour from holidaymakers visiting Italy – but authorities are too busy cashing in to stop it, reports Catherine Bennett

Not all visitors to the Colosseum treat it with respect (AP)

The gap between what tourists imagine Italy to be and the reality can sometimes seem more like a chasm. Exhibit A: the indignant TikTok of a woman who had travelled to the Amalfi coast only to find that the beautiful, clifftop villages didn’t have luggage service or lifts. She was ridiculed online, but it was a perfect illustration of the fallacy of social media, which only highlights the best aspects of a destination, without its rough edges.

Many Venice residents have an amusing anecdote about the questions they’ve been asked by tourists, like “Where’s the exit?” or “What time does Venice close?” An Italian journalist recounted how a tourist asked them where the city was – while they were standing in the middle of the Campo San Polo, an enormous square just minutes from the Rialto Bridge. The tourist couldn’t believe that this bustling, living city was the mythical Atlantis sunk beneath the waves that they expected to find.

It’s a vicious cycle that’s repeated across Europe: visitors go to Rome or Dubrovnik and take their idyllic, pastel-hued photos; people see these sanitised photos online and decide to go, without understanding what it’s really like.