Bergamo, pensioner explains monuments: fined for abusive practice of guiding profession

Finding a way to keep yourself busy as a retiree by using what you learned while on the job can be dangerous. In fact, it has happened that a retired art education teacher has joined the University for All Ages in Casatenovo (Lecco), a way to engage retirees in taking field trips and delving into topics and subjects that in previous life one did not have the opportunity to study, but, as the website PrimaBergamo reports. it, professor Rosita Corbetta, who was explaining to about 20 associates the beauties of Bergamo Alta was stopped by the Local Police and charged withabusive exercise of the profession of tour guide: two thousand euro fine.

“What happened is truly surreal and we would never have imagined it,” the association’s president, Samuele Baio, explained to the Bergamasque newspaper. “Besides being a friend and a member of the board, Rosita represents an added value for our association, because she makes her vast knowledge in the artistic field available to the participants in our courses. On Tuesday, March 28, we decided to travel to Bergamo in person with a minibus so that we could attend one of her live art history lectures. We visited the municipal palace, the Colleoni Chapel and then the cathedral. Staying outside the cathedral, so as not to be a nuisance, Rosita started telling us about the history of the place, some of the details of the façade, the inlays of the wooden choir inside ... when at one point two traffic policemen came and asked her for her papers. They started asking both her and me several questions, they asked for our documents claiming that they had received a report that our associate was doing the work of a tour guide without authorization. Of course, this was not true, because she was just making her knowledge available to us, totally free of charge. Even the police officers actually seemed a little embarrassed, but they explained to us that they had to proceed anyway....”

The issue is a long-standing one, we know, because there are many unauthorized guides, especially in large cities or tourist resorts, and the various professional associations are pushing for more and more controls, and various have also been the controversies in recent years over licensing in the relevant territory (local or national) as the ’war’ is also among the licensed guides themselves who perhaps see colleagues from Puglia arriving to explain the monuments of Milan, taking work away from native guides.

According to the legislation, “a tour guide is defined as a professional licensed to illustrate and interpret, in the course of on-site visits, including those with educational purposes, for the benefit of individuals or groups, the tangible and intangible assets that constitute Italy’s historical, cultural, religious, architectural, artistic, archaeological and monumental heritage, in correlation also with the demo-ethno-anthropological, landscape, production and enogastronomic contexts that characterize the territorial specificities.” However, there are also cases that do not fall within this scope: in Piedmont, for example, the regional law regulating the matter (Law 33 of November 26, 2001) states that the provisions do not apply “to those who carry out, free of charge, the activities regulated by this law in favor of members and guests of entities and bodies, which operate on a nonprofit basis for purposes recreational, cultural, religious and social purposes or who work, on behalf of a local authority, on account of specialized knowledge,” or “to teaching or environmental education activities carried out by experts, limited to their field of specialization, aimed at schools of all levels.” If the teacher wants to challenge the report, she may have to appeal similar limitations.

In any case, what is new this year is that the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRP), approved by Decision of the EU ECOFIN Council of Ministers on July 13, 2021, provides in Measure M1C3-10, by December 31, 2023, for the reform of the regulation of the professions of tour guides. Of course, a distinction must be made between those who practice guided tours through remuneration and those who, like the retired professor, simply explain things they know as a source of their personal culture. We will see, after the attempts made by former minister Dario Franceschini, how the regulations will evolve for a sector that in Italy is the entrance ticket to our culture.

Image: view of Bergamo Alta

Bergamo, pensioner explains monuments: fined for abusive practice of guiding profession

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