Italy has seen a spate of tourists behaving badly this summer.

Two German tourists who scrawled their names on Italy's landmark Ponte Vecchio bridge risk being fined up to €40,000, the city of Florence said in a statement this week.

The incident occurred on Monday afternoon when municipal police spotted the two visitors - reportedly a man and woman aged 23 and 21 - using a black marker to deface the 14th-century bridge.

The pair now face a "maxi fine" of between €10,000 and €40,000, the city said, under Italy's tough new laws to prevent the damage or destruction of cultural heritage.

Calling for "expemplary punishments", the city's security councillor Andrea Giorgio said: “We need respect for the city... Whoever comes to Florence must respect its monuments and the Florentines."

Florence is currently undertaking a €2 million restoration project on Ponte Vecchio which dates to 1345 and was the only bridge in the city spared from destruction in world war two.

In January this year the Italian government ushered in new laws to protect monuments from being defaced following a series of high-profile incidents, several of which occurred in Florence.

Last year German football fans vandalised the Vasari Corridor with graffiti, and climate activists sprayed paint on Palazzo Vecchio, with the latter tackled in the act by then mayor Dario Nardella.

In recent days a British tourist was detained for scraping his initials and those of his two daughters onto a wall at the House of the Vestals in Pompeii, reportedly telling police that he wanted to leave a record of his visit.

In June a Dutch tourist was cited for writing graffiti inside an ancient Roman domus in Herculaneum while last summer a Bulgarian man living in England sparked outrage after he carved "Ivan+Hayley 23” into a wall at the Colosseum.

Photo credit: Olha Solodenko / Shutterstock.com.