the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, this ignominious heap is a "world scandal". Giorgio Napolitano, the country's president, called it "a disgrace for Italy". To Walter Veltroni, a former leader of Italy's opposition Democratic party, it is the proof that the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi "is not interested in culture". Unesco, which today announced it was sending a team of inspectors, said it had had "a devastating effect internationally".
Six days ago, the Schola Armaturarum Juventus Pompeiani, usually translated into English as Pompeii's House of the Gladiators, collapsed. It had survived the cataclysmic volcanic eruption in AD79 that engulfed and wiped out the town, a partial excavation in the 1920s that exposed its facade but left its rear rooms still buried, and even heavy Allied bombing in 1943 that forced it to be extensively rebuilt in the 1950s.