A famous fountain in the centre of Rome was vandalised in the early hours of Tuesday morning by four drunken foreigners.
The three men and a woman, all from Eastern Europe, used a large screwdriver to break off part of the papal coat of arms decorating the Barcaccia (Old Boat) Fountain at the base of the Spanish Steps in Piazza di Spagna.
They were subsequently arrested by police as they danced around in the waters of the fountain, still clutching their screwdriver.
The small, detached segment was recovered and art restorers called to the site to inspect the damage said it would be easy to reattach.
Police said the four foreigners were "completely drunk" and reacted violently as they tried to haul them out of the fountain.
They said they would be charged with resisting arrest as well as vandalism.
The four, a Russian, a Moldavian, a Lithuanian and a Ukrainian, arrived in Italy two months ago and have no prior police record, investigators said.
The Fontana della Barcaccia, designed to look like a semi-submerged, leaking boat, is one of Rome's most celebrated monumental fountains.
Pietro Bernini was commissioned by Pope Urban VIII to build the fountain in 1627 but most scholars believe the sculptor's famous son Gian Lorenzo helped his elderly father with the project.
It was completed in 1629, shortly before Pietro Bernini's death.
According to an unlikely legend, the pope had the fountain installed after being impressed by a boat that was washed onto the square by flooding of the Tiber.
It is not the first time that Rome's tourist-drawing fountains have been attacked by vandals.
A stone bee, one of three decorating Bernini's Fontana delle Api (Bee Fountain) at the beginning of the chic Via Veneto, has been decapitated twice, once in 2004 and again a year later.
Bernini, considered the greatest exponent of the Italian baroque, sculpted the bee fountain for Urban VIII in 1644, 13 years before he started work on the famous colonnade in front of St. Peter's Basilica.
In a high-profile case in 1997, two Romans splashing about in another Bernini fountain, the world-famous Four Rivers fountain in Piazza Navona, broke off the tail of a dragon.
One of the most notorious incidents of art heritage vandalism in Italy occurred in May 1972 when a Hungarian man took a hammer to Michelangelo's Pieta' in St Peter's, badly disfiguring the statue.
