Posting on the History Walks Venice website has been slow recently, and will be a bit slow in the coming months too.

The reason is, that the Italian Ministry of Tourism has decided that — after ten years of hiatus — it should now be possible to become an authorised tourist guide again.

There are many, and complicated, reasons for such a pause, but being an authorised tourist guide would allow me to do more varied and more interesting tours, also inside museums, churches and monuments, which I cannot do with my current licence.

I have therefore signed up for the exam, and need to prepare for it.

The Italian state has, however, given the whole sector a thorough overhaul, and the rules, regulations and curriculum are all changed. In fact, nobody seems to know when the exam will be, or what it will cover, except in very generic terms.

Also, since there hasn’t been a tourist guide exam for a decade, instead of the expected four thousand applicants, over thirty thousand have signed up.

Consequently, rather than studying what I’d like to, and write about it on this site, in the Venetian Stories newsletter, and on the just started Venetian Stories podcast, I find myself following almost daily online courses in Italian history, art history, archaeology, geography and all the legal and bureaucratic aspects of being an authorised tourist guide.

One of the problems is, that while the old system of authorised guides was regional, the new system is national. I therefore need to read up on all the other regions, including quite a few where I have never set foot.

So, I’m studying for an exam, for which the curriculum is large but vague, and which nobody knows when it will be.

The exam has three parts: a written test, and for those who pass that, at a later date, an oral test and a simulated guided tour of somewhere.

The date for the initial written test could be any time during the summer or in the autumn. It could be just about anywhere in Italy.

Organising an exam for thirty thousand persons is no mean feat, so the general expectation is that there will be a place for the exam somewhere in each Italian region, but nobody knows. There are many rumours swirling around, but very few facts.

This also means, that while I accept bookings for tours all through the summer, there’s always the caveat, that if they put the exam on that date somewhere distant, I might have to cancel bookings.