A centuries-old Italian tradition has been turned into a free-for-all for opportunists, as a viral video shows a migrant casually intercepting a tourist’s coin before it can even reach the grate.
In the footage circulating widely online, a woman stands at the Fontana del Porcellino in Florence’s Mercato Nuovo. She rubs the bronze wild boar’s snout for good luck, a ritual said to guarantee a return to the city, and prepares to drop a coin into the grate below. According to local custom, if the coin falls through, the wish is granted. The money collected is donated to Italian charities, including children’s hospitals and orphanages.
Before the coin can complete its short journey, a man of African appearance, sitting right beside the fountain, reaches out and grabs it in the air. The tourist reacts with visible frustration, gesturing in disbelief as the man keeps the coin. No apology. No shame. Just another easy score.
For more than 500 years, this harmless tourist ritual has continued without issue. Now, as one Spanish-language post put it, “they’ve added extra difficulty”: throw the coin and an African immigrant snatches it.
This is not an isolated incident. Similar videos and reports have emerged repeatedly in recent years. Italian media have documented groups systematically emptying the grate, sometimes using magnets, pliers or simply waiting for tourists to toss their coins. Police have made arrests, including of irregular migrants, yet the problem persists in plain sight of visitors who come from around the world to experience Renaissance Florence.
The coins are not “spare change.” They are intended for local charities. Every euro taken is money diverted from Italian children and hospitals. Locals and traders have complained for years that the area around the Porcellino has become a magnet for petty crime linked to uncontrolled migration.
Florence, cradle of Western art and culture, is now forced to watch one of its most charming traditions degraded in real time. Tourists who travel thousands of miles to participate in a piece of living history are left looking like easy marks. The message to the world is clear: even a simple act of good luck can be exploited if the wrong people are allowed to loiter unchecked.
Europe’s open-border experiment continues to deliver these daily humiliations. While politicians in Brussels and Rome talk about “enrichment” and “diversity,” ordinary citizens and visitors see the opposite: the slow erosion of public order and the casual theft of a city’s goodwill.
