Pompeii Falling to Bits

Pompeii is falling to bits, the Italians simply cannot be trusted to look after it. The site has been plagued for decades by accusations of mismanagement, neglect and even infiltration by the local Camorra mafia ('Artemis fresco stolen from Pompeii' Gazete del Sud, 18/03/2014). 

In November 2010 the House of the Gladiators came down, prompting Italian President Giorgio Napolitano to say: "This is a disgrace for the whole of Italy". In February 2012 a piece of plaster came off the the Temple of Jupiter, one of Pompeii's main attractions. Then, in September 2012, at the Villa of the Mysteries, an even more iconic building, a five-metre-long flying buttress gave in and went crashing to the ground. Last November, finally, a wall in one of the ancient city's main thoroughfares, Via dell'Abbondanza, keeled over while another piece of decorative plaster, at the House of the Little Fountain, dropped from the ceiling. Heavy rain was blamed for a wall of a Roman-era shop collapsing in Pompeii at the start of the month, a day after two other precious parts of the ancient city - a wall at the Temple of Venus and another wall on a tomb in the famed necropolis of Porta Nocera - suffered serious damage from bad weather.
UNESCO in July gave Italy until December 31 to apply a series of upgrade measures or face having Pompeii removed from its prestigious list of World Heritage sites. The measures included video surveillance of 50% of the area and a buffer zone around the site. Rome implemented most of the measures and got an extended deadline for the others.