It was one of my two nines I gave in this challenge (I gave no ten in this challenge) and the other one was the blue ribbon so I liked it very much and think it should have been in at least top ten. It is perhaps that most of the people here doesn't understand the language, Portugese I suppose.
And no way, including any background wouldn't have done anything but destroy the picture!
This shot suffers a little from jpeg artifacts around the text. If you had got closer to the 150k limit it would have been much better. it's only 53k.. Nice image though, although I don't read german? Italian? :-).