2023-08-05 04:26:09
The ‘cicerones’ who teach the Bel Paese to tourists will have to be more prepared and multilingual. No more trespassers and chaos surrounding tour guides in Italy. The Meloni Government ends with the irregularities and abuses which, faced with the legislative vacuum, have created a serious situation, especially in Rome and in the cities of art. The Council of Ministers has approved a series of measures on tourism, creating a specific regulations for tour guides. Some numbers give the measure of the profession.
There are currently some 27,000 authorized guides (in 2019 there were 25,000). It is difficult to calculate the number of intruders, but according to the Ministry of Tourism, an emblematic case is that of Rome: out of three thousand qualified guides (of which no more than two thousand are active), there can be up to about 500 active irregularswhich partly operate and “attract” customers through web platforms.
They operate especially in the areas of the Colosseum and the Vatican Museums. It is quite normal to find people in these places who present themselves as guides, sometimes also offering skip-the-line tickets. Also, there’s a lot black market In Internet. There are those who offer tours of the city, presented as free experiences, but in reality they perform a true abusive tour guide service. It’s about the calls ‘Free tours’which proliferate on the Internet in the main tourist cities, until now being difficult to frame them in a regulatory framework and therefore difficult to sanction.
Even some tour operators sometimes use irregular tour guides, for economic convenience, with a lower cost and black payment. In reality, it is an abusive activity of the tour guide to the detriment of the entire sector and the visitor himself.
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The regulation approved by the Meloni Government had been expected for many years and is part of “a revolution in tourism”, according to Daniela Santanché, Italian minister of the industry. It has been prepared by listening to all the professional categories of the sector, with many meetings. Among the novelties is the creation of a national list of tourist guides: the registration is the “necessary condition to develop the activity of tourist guide”.
To become a guide and enter the national registry, you must pass a review – the same in all the Italian regions – authorization for the whole country, carried out by the Ministry of Tourism. It will consist of a test written, oral and technical-practical. In addition, the law provides for the attribution of a specific “Ateco code” (Code of Economic Activities) and that tourist guides can achieve greater thematic and territorial specializations and they are forced to update professional, as it happens in all professional categories.
The Association of Tourist Guides considers that the Government has taken a decisive step to eliminate intrusiveness in this profession: “The fact that there is now a national registry and the license or unique card for all of Italy they are fundamental – they comment from the Association of Tourist Guides -. Currently carrying out controls is objectively difficult, if not impossible, with dozens of different licenses, and even some regions without the list of guides. Even the rules regarding Internet intruders are important, because until now we didn’t have the legal weapons to fight them.”
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