Historical Graffiti

One of the fascinating things about climbing around Roman ruins is discovering the graffiti left by past visitors. While there is an abundance of ball-point pen etchings from recent visitors that pains a historian like me to see, I find I am less pained when I find graffiti from hundreds of years ago. Many of the places I have visited were stops along the route of the Grand Tour, a mostly British tradition of taking a year after graduating from university to tour the Continent. While many of these tours involved copious amounts of alcohol and numerous brothel visits, others involved trips to view the ruins of Rome, which were becoming increasingly popular as part of the Neo-Classical movement. I make a point at every site to try to find the oldest graffiti. At many places the oldest is from the 18th or 19th century, but at some, such as the Temple of Diana in Nimes, the oldest dates to the medieval period, with a number of inscriptions from the 17th century. I loved discovering that writing one's name and the name of one's lover inside a heart dates back at least to the early 18th century. I have also since learned that graffiti of hammers next to one's name is something that stonemasons did when they visited an ancient building with architecture they particularly admired. This is why there are so many images of hammers on the Pont du Gard. It was an engineering masterpiece that all stonemasons admired. While Pompeii is said to have more graffiti than any other place and I look forward to seeing it, I have also enjoyed finding graffiti on lesser-known buildings that demonstrate first how old the tourism industry is, and second, how long Roman ruins have received the admiration of visitors like me. Although, while I can admire historical graffiti, I could never bring myself to add my own message to later generations of intrepid visitors.

Lovers' Graffiti from 1725, Temple of Diana, Nimes

Stonemasons' graffiti from 1642 and 1677, Temple of Diana, Nimes