Broken tour

Grossman was ordered to pay a €500 fine and stop offering on-site lessons unless he hired a tour guide. But the damage cut far deeper. In effect, the verdict would end his Italian stay, since to renew a residency permit after a conviction is not easy in Italy.

But the verdict was far from popular. Several newspapers and organizations expressed outrage.

Vincenzo Donvito of the Association for the Rights of Users and Consumers (ADUC), a consumer group, wrote: "Today the tour guide 'corporation' has won a point to its advantage, but we have a strong impression that the cost of their victory will be paid by all of us, and not only Grossman."

Grossman ally Alei was distressed. "My worry, as an Italian professor who has studied and taught in foreign countries," he wrote in a letter to the city, "is that for many scholars, Grossman's conviction has put Siena in a bad light as well as compromised research on Italian art. It has made our country seem ridiculous among those who study our culture at a high level."

Immediately after the verdict, Grossman appealed, selling his car to pay legal fees. This time he enlisted Eriberto Rosso, a noted Florentine lawyer. The Florence appellate court heard the case on May 7, 2004, more than a year later. In a strange twist, the local prosecutor asked that the charges be dismissed, according to Bielli, because he'd had almost no involvement in the AGT Siena's original case.

Rosso continued nonetheless, following protocol. The dropping of charges does not in itself void a conviction. He followed Bielli's lead, saying that Grossman's web remarks could not be construed as defamation because "the statements didn't constitute a value judgment of the tour guides, but represented simply the activity objectively carried out by the guides with respect to tour groups." He added: "The activity exercised by the accused cannot be associated with that of the tour guides, since it was of a didactic activity." Rosso also challenged the legality of the AGT Siena filing the suit in criminal court.

After a brief recess, Grossman returned to hear that the original ruling had been reversed; he'd been exonerated. Elated, he turned and smiled at his friend Alei, who had come to lend support. Forty months had passed since the AGT Siena suit. There was no defamation, said the appellate judge, because "[the statements] made by [Grossman] were only descriptive, and had no denigrating meaning with respect to [guides]." He also ruled that the alleged insult on the website was in fact a mistranslation; the word "memorized" was written as "mandati a memoria," which can be interpreted in a more pejorative way than the more accurate "memorizzati."

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