Your Licensed Professional Tour Guide in Rome

For me, an American in Rome, being able to take the tour guide exam was the chance of a lifetime.

Please remember this: tour guides in Rome and Italy are considered professionals and must be licensed to perform their services.

Tour guides in Rome and Italy earn their license via official exams given by the Italian regions or provinces.

Tourism is one of Rome's and Italy's leading industries. To ensure high standards and to protect you, the consumer, from wherever in the world you hail, Italian legislation, both national and local, defines the tourism professions and requires that hotels, travel agencies, travel agency directors and individual operators, such as tour guides and tour escorts, possess a license.

On the job in Rome, tour guides always wear or carry their license with them, to be shown upon request to the authorities.

Licensed tour guides in Rome do not need to look over their shoulder to see whether the police are coming. Individuals performing tourist guide services in Rome without a license, in virtually whatever guise they assume, are breaking the law.

Between 1999 and 2001 three exams to earn the Rome tour guide license were given. All Rome residents, Italian and foreign, with an advanced education and their papers in order were eligible to take the third exam, given by the Province of Rome.

Surfing the web today, you find numerous sites for Rome tour guide services offered by excellent or native English-speakers who qualify themselves as long-time residents of the city, insiders, experts, historians, art historians, archaeologists, students, teachers.

Please beware: if these individuals don't state they are licensed Rome tour guides, you can be sure they are not legally certified to perform tour guide services in Rome.

The proof is in the license.

Rome's professional tour guides have studied long and hard to earn their license, which they will be proud to show you upon request.

For me, as a long-time Rome resident and one of the few Americans to be an officially licensed tourist guide of Rome and Province, the profession represents even more.

Because Rome is a city of history, art and culture like no other, a city of inestimable beauty filled with treasures wherever you turn, by law it must be presented, and represented, only by those who submitted to the (agonizing) process to be judged a certified professional, passed the test, earned the license.

For me, guiding is an art and touring Rome with you a delight. I most enjoy guiding families and friends on private small group tours of Rome, the Vatican and Tivoli, touring Rome with people who have chosen the Eternal City as their destination, who are curious to learn, to see Rome's sights, to experience the fascination and uniqueness of the world's most beautiful city, to drink it all in.

The wonders of Rome will enthrall you. I want to be the guide who makes it happen!

Rome deserves no less than the best, and as your licensed professional tour guide of Rome I want to give you the best Rome has to offer!