Broken tour

Some writers and scholars who advertise tours of Italy on the web tend to do the same thing, covering their flanks. For example, Rome-based author Alan Epstein, an American who has written extensively about Italy, advertises customized tours on his website but noted in an email that "accredited guides" accompany his tours, placing him well within the confines of the law.

But Grossman vehemently refuses to acknowledge even the hint of a link between his vocation of teaching and behaving as a guide. "I am a university educated scholar. I have two Masters degrees in art history and have completed my Ph.D. coursework from Columbia University. I am not a tour guide." His tone is that of a man frustrated at having to continually convince people outside the American educational system that these advanced degrees are significant.

Ceccarelli's refutation of Grossman is tart. "It's too easy to say that you are teaching [so you are exempt from needing a license]. I am teaching, because everyday in front of my clients, I teach. [My clients] say to me, 'Oh, how knowledgeable you are, oh we learned so much.' So if we use the word teaching this way, we are all teaching."

To the AGT Siena the matter was clear. Whatever his educational pedigree, the law required that Grossman get a tour guide license if he wished to keep operating his business. The two sides quarreled in 2000, and Grossman remembered his exasperation. "Why should I have to interrupt my research, my teaching, to go back and take a course that teaches me what I already know?" he says. "Why should professors get tour guide licenses? If we did, we would be taking legitimate business away from tour guides. We're not guides. We don't want to be tour guides."

There's another complication. Despite the law, the AGT Siena's tour guide course is not an annual offering in Siena. A Siena city official, who declined to be named, said the course wasn't being offered this year and doubted it would be next. "It is up to the AGT Siena to decide when the test is given," the official said tersely. The AGT Siena also determined how many candidates should be allowed into the course when it's offered. For now, there are too many guides and not enough work. So even if Grossman, or someone like him, wished to bid for a license, his chances might be slim.

When it finally came, the suit against Grossman was a result of a complaint filed by guide Donatella Grilli to then-AGT President Vittoria Nepi Adami. Though a civil action, the AGT Siena filed the complaint in criminal court using Article 348 of the penal code, a section that might be used, say, if a doctor performed surgery without a license.

Grossman turned to Bielli to represent him. And Bielli, who had helped start Grossman's business, immediately asked Grossman to abridge the wording on his website. "I made him change it right away because at first, let's say, it wasn't well done. There was this lack of clarity in the presentation that could leave doubts on what this activity really was," said Bielli. "Let's say it was putting in elements that were not exactly connected to the history of art."

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