✍️ Italy, According to Online Reviewers

'A big pile of rocks,’ ‘gratuitous nudity,’ and the risks of the 'influencer echo chamber'

Customer review: the Colosseum, Rome (EJL image)

The Colosseum has survived earthquakes and fires, the collapse of the Roman Empire, being looted for parts, wars and invasions, and the urban stress of traffic and pollution.

Now it is facing the angry wrath of the disappointed modern-day tourist.

“Past its prime,” wrote one tourist from California. “Takes up an absurd amount of space,” quipped another visitor, this one from Colorado. A tourist from the U.K. said it was “nothing more than a dirty, crumbling eyesore,” while another Brit called it “the worst of all tourist attractions.” From another Coloradan: it “seemed like it hadn’t been used in years.” And in what might be the most succinct of all the Colosseum’s negative reviews, a visitor from Australia labeled the site simply “a big pile of rocks.”

Of course, the Colosseum isn’t alone.

An Indian tourist described the nearby Roman Forum as “a big hole near the Colosseum where all the rocks are kept.”

Further afield, a Scottish traveler blamed the Leaning Tower of Pisa for being “much smaller than I imagined.”

The Uffizi in Florence? Filled with “low-quality art … [and] gratuitous nudity,” according to a Californian, while another from the same state called it “a complete waste of time and money.”

A tourist from Alabama said Venice’s Peggy Guggenheim Collection was full of “third-rate works … [that] would never make it to the wall of the average American living room.”

But few reviews can match the insight of an English visitor who complained that the Grand Canal in Venice “was under water when I saw it.”