Tourists damage crystal-covered chair in Italian museum by sitting on it

Rome: An Italian museum has contacted the police after two clumsy tourists almost wrecked a work of art while posing for photos.

Video footage released by Palazzo Maffei in Verona showed the hapless pair photographing each other pretending to sit on a crystal-covered chair made by the artist Nicola Bolla – described by the museum as an “extremely fragile” work.

The woman squats and does not seem to touch the work – called Van Gogh’s Chair and covered in Swarovski crystals – but the man is not so careful, sitting and then stumbling backwards as the seat buckles under his weight.

The pair can then be seen fleeing the room in footage that went viral over the weekend.

Palazzo Maffei described it as “every museum’s nightmare” and said on Monday it had made a complaint to the police, without specifying when it was filed.

The museum posted an account on social media on Thursday saying the incident had happened in the past four weeks and the chair had since been repaired.

“It was an idiotic thing to do,” Bolla told Italian magazine Fanpage. But the artist said he could see a “positive side” to the incident. “It’s like a kind of performance. Ordinary people can do it too, not just artists.”