Family-Friendly Tour Guide
The right family-friendly tour guide while on vacation is a game changer. We had a great time enjoying local Italian culture on our own, but our tour guides in Rome and Pompeii made the experience in those historic cities extraordinary.
We found our tour guides in 3 different ways, 2 of which worked pretty well.
Our absolute favorite were the tour guides (docents) that we hired through Context Travel (www.contexttravel.com). Their tag line is “Private Guides and (Very) Small Group Tours for the Intellectually Curious Traveler.” When they know the guide is going to be working with families, Context asks a lot of questions about your kids and pairs you with a docent that has experience with kids of that age (and often themselves have kids of their own that age). The docents are all extremely well educated, and were able to field every question we had with a deep response. For example, here is the bio for one of them (wow!):
After obtaining her degree in Literature at the Sapienza University of Rome, Valeria completed a Master's in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology at U.C. Berkeley where she received the A.H.M.A. Graduate Fellowship. Valeria came back to Europe and took a M Litt. in Modern History at the Oxford University, Oriel College. She can read documents in Latin (Classical, Medieval); Greek (Classical, New Testament); Egyptian (Hieroglyphics, Hieratic); Coptic; Hebrew; Aramaic; Hittite (Cuneiform); Linear B; Old Persian; Sogdian; Pahlavi; Parthian and Sumerian. She has extensive archeological field work experience, which includes working as a Site Director at the ‘Largo di Torre Argentina Project’, the excavation of the Ripafratta Castle, (Lucca) with the Università di Pisa-G.A.R., and the Tel Dor Excavation (Tel Dor, Israel), alongside a team from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1988, she was a representative of her University at the International Congress of Egyptology in Cairo, Egypt and she is also qualified in Book and Manuscript Conservation. When she was doing her Master's at Berkeley, she taught Italian Language and Literature as and, at Oxford, she taught History to undergraduates. She has been working as a tour Guide since 2006.
We had two of their docents take us to and through the Vatican, St. Peter’s Basilica, Colosseum, Roman Forum, and Palatine Hill. The kids were super-engaged, had fun, and learned a ton
We hired a guide via Trip Advisor (www.tripadvisor.com) recommendations when we visited Pompeii. We had a short phone interview with her before arriving to make sure we clicked and she was kid-friendly. Although not as pedigreed as the docent’s from Context, she was a 3rd generation tour guide and was able to bring the preserved city of Pompeii back to life.
In Venice, we hired a tour guide that was recommended by our hotel concierge. Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to connect with the kids at their level, and it felt more like we were just following her around than really learning and experiencing the history of Venice.
Next time we vacation in a historic city, we are definitely going to look into finding the right guide. It makes a huge difference.
