Campania guides: they only let regionally licensed guides into Pompeii. Arbitrary and serious act

We receive and publish a letter from a group of tour guides from Campania (including art historians, archivists, historians and graduates in other humanities disciplines) who work in their region but have had to obtain their certification outside the borders of Campania since no competitions have been issued in the region for some time. The Campania guides intend to denounce the fact that the Pompeii Archaeological Park is preventing access to the reserved station for guides who have obtained their certification as tour guides outside Campania, even though the requirements indicate otherwise. Below is the text.

We are a group of tour guides from Campania. We represent art historians, archaeologists, archivists, historians and other graduates in the humanities who, while working in this area where we were born and raised, have had to go outside the region to find a certification exam for the profession of tour guide, since no competitions are issued in our region.

We are writing to report that the Pompeii Archaeological Park, after the epidemic, closed its doors to us tour guides licensed in a region other than Campania, in an arbitrary and serious act, preventing us from doing our work in our territory.

To understand what we are talking about, we need to go back a few years.

With National Law 97/2013 (Art. 3) transposing European legislation, the tour guide can exercise his profession no longer only in the region where he took the certification exam, but throughout Italy. The central state, however, has never brought forward a reform of the qualification, thus creating much confusion: competitions are issued by the regions, in different ways and at different times, but the qualification applies throughout the country.

And so since 2013, thousands of Italian graduates like us have been moving from one region to another to register for the first useful exam, and thus begin as soon as possible a job that for many is a great desire, for others a fallback, in a country that offers fewer and fewer opportunities for job stability in the field of cultural heritage.

But let us return now to the Campania Region. The last competition for tour guides was in 2012. The qualification procedure for that exam ended in 2015: so it took a good three years just to complete the procedures, while according to regional laws the competition should be issued every three years. But eight have already passed, and no exam is in sight. Many Campanians, as soon as they had the chance, resorted to habilitation in other regions, not by choice but by necessity.

Returning then to the case of Pompeii, in the reopening regulations, the Archaeological Park stated that:

“At the entrance to Piazza Anfiteatro it will be possible to request a guided tour service, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., by guides from the Campania Region and national guides,” adhering as it should to current regulations.

But on May 25, the Park with a resounding and unmotivated about-face changes the wording, reserving the possibility of being part of the guide garrison only to guides licensed in Campania. The result, even on the official panels inside the park, is a shameful black marker erasure on the word “national.” What happened? Why does the park deprive so many young professional graduates - licensed in various parts of Italy but almost always from Campania - of the opportunity to work?

The indignation and anger is really so great, we are boys and girls from Campania who find ourselves discriminated against by the most important and frequented cultural institution in the Region, because of a choice that has no justification and that goes against European and national law, prevented from carrying out our profession at a time when we were coming out of months of total lack of work due to the COVID emergency.

We ask and wonder if this could be acceptable by an institution like the Pompeii Archaeological Park, we ask you to take our voices to the Park’s leadership, because we just want to work, like everyone else, and we don’t understand what could have prompted the Superintendency to take such an act, without even offering a public justification.

Pictured: Pompeii. Ph. Credit Ralph Hawkins

Campania guides: they only let regionally licensed guides into Pompeii. Arbitrary and serious act

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