A Photo Gone Wrong in the Uffizi Fuels Selfie Worries in Europe’s Museums

It’s another summer of European selfie snafus.

On Saturday, a visitor to the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, Italy, stepped backward into a painting while trying to pose like its subject, Ferdinando de’ Medici, a 17th-century grand prince and patron of the arts.

For the Uffizi’s director, that was the last straw, and he isn’t alone in his frustration. This spring, in the Palazzo Maffei in Verona, Italy, a visitor broke a chair covered in Swarovski crystals. This, too, was the result of a snapshot gone wrong: A man apparently waited for the guards to leave before posing, in an ill-fated attempt at squatting. And this month, the staff at the Louvre Museum in Paris went on an unauthorized strike to protest, in part, overcrowding and the headaches caused by selfie-taking tourists.

“The problem of visitors who come to museums to make memes or take selfies for social media is rampant,” Simone Verde, the Uffizi’s director, said in a statement.

Europe’s museums are struggling to cope with the problematic side of their large-scale appeal and protect their collections from summer visitors who flock to their galleries to make social media content and cool down in rare continental air-conditioning, whether or not they gain a deeper knowledge of art and culture.

The recent episodes, at the start of the high tourist season, have called attention to a longstanding problem: too many tourists toting too many phones. Museums have not been able to find a foolproof compromise, despite their best efforts.

“This problem, with tourists damaging artwork, is something that is increasingly happening,” said Marina Novelli, the director of the Sustainable Travel and Tourism Advanced Research Center at Nottingham University in England.