If you’ve ever visited a tourist hotspot abroad and wondered whether the legend attached to it might be a lie, Italy has a cautionary tale that will reinforce your skepticism.
According to CNN, one man spent years convincing tourists that a hillside near Arcugnano was home to an ancient Greek or Roman theater. It wasn’t. He built the whole thing himself and then sold tickets to a legend of his own invention.
Franco Malosso claimed he discovered the roughly 54,000-square-foot site after a landslide. He charged visitors up to €40 to see its marvelous, ancient stone seating, beautiful columns, statues, and artificial pond, presenting it as an archaeological treasure dating to antiquity.
He even claimed Julius Caesar and Cleopatra had visited. He couldn’t help but stretch the reality of his own fiction by telling visitors that Juliet Capulet once lived here. You know, of Romeo and Juliet fame, the famously fictional couple invented by William Shakespeare.
This ‘Ancient Roman Theater’ Was Actually a Modern Tourist Scam
Of course, not one bit of it was ancient, other than the age-old practice of bullsh—ing to make a quick buck. Malosso had hired some guys to build the site, and they did so using very modern concrete and newly quarried stone, very contemporary plaster, and who knows, maybe there’s some superglue in there somewhere or some such material that dates back to the Roosevelt administration.
There were other little details that he was sure no one would look into too much. For instance, the ancient Greeks never colonized this far north. And there was also the more minor but still glaringly obvious issue if you’re equipped with some actual architectural knowledge: he was billing it as an amphitheater, when it was just a regular theater. His theater was fan-shaped. An amphitheater is an oval.
None of that mattered. Visitors who didn’t know any better left glowing reviews. The guy had a real knack for storytelling that quite literally paid off even though none of it made any historical sense.
Local authorities started looking into the validity of the site’s claims back in 2016. The inspection to determine whether it was all fake took only a day, because the people who actually know a little ancient archaeological history found the whiff of bullsh—t coming off this place particularly potent.
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