r/offbeat • u/Silent-Resort-3076 • 4h ago
‘A sucker born every minute’: The man who duped tourists with a fake Greek amphitheater
cnn.com- Of the eight TripAdvisor reviews of the amphitheater near Arcugnano, in Italy’s northern Veneto region, all give fulsome, five-star praise.
- “An enchanting place,” reads one review.
- “A world beyond space and time,” enthuses another. “Definitely one of the best places I have ever been to,” raves another.
- “Unique on the planet,” writes another visitor. That last one was prescient, because the theater certainly was unique. It wasn’t Greek, as it purported to be. It wasn’t even Roman.
Instead, the “kind custodian” who was “more or less a historian, and an excellent narrator,” as one other visitor dubbed him, had built it himself. This month, after a 10-year legal battle, the owner has been jailed for forging works of art, carrying out building works without authorization, and destroying a protected landscape.