9. Florence luggage storage. The luggage storage office in the main train station at Florence is nothing more than a legalized den of thieves, Italian-style. Rather than being honest and pulling out a gun and robbing tourists, the local luggage office charges ten dollars a day to store one bag. That’s not a misprint. This legal monopoly charges ten dollars a day to throw a bag on a shelf. Last time I was in Florence there had to be five hundred bags in the storage room. At ten dollars a day that’s USD 150,000 a month in revenue generated with minimal cost. Needless to say, somebody is getting rich from this scam.

10. The Mona Lisa Motorway. The Mona Lisa hangs in a little alcove at the end of a very long hallway in the Louvre. As a result, you see hundreds of tourists per hour damn near running down that hallway towards that one picture. After seeing it, most of them leave the Louvre through the convenient exit nearby. Well, by walking down that hallway and not stopping, you have missed roughly ten percent of the total number of Leonardo da Vinci paintings in the world. There’s only one Leonardo in the entire Western Hemisphere (in Washington, DC), but thousands of people go to the Louvre, pay to get in, and walk past four of them. Also hanging in that hallway are paintings by Raphael, Bronzino, Caravaggio, Correggio, and Carracd. If I were to take all of those paintings on tour, I could pack millions of people into museums anywhere in the world outside of France.