Italian Tourist Guides: Giro d'Italia in Brera? Alliances are key, marriage of art and sport can work

The Italian Tourist Guides (GTI) respond with a note to colleagues from theNational Association of Tourist Guides (ANGT), which this morning made an attack on the Giro d’Italia, which filmed a commercial at the Pinacoteca di Brera with multiple world champion Peter Sagan in the role of a tourist following a guide: for the ANGT, the commercial would be “highly offensive and damaging to the entire professional category of Tourist Guides” as it is guilty of passing commonplaces about tourist guides. GTI downplays the ANGT’s attack through a statement by President Simone Fiderigo Franci, who says that ANGT’s is a “fall from grace” and the reasons given by colleagues are “embarrassing,” for several reasons.

“First, promoting the link between sports and tourism can only benefit both sectors, which need to restart,” Franci states. “The link with a sport of hard work and sacrifice like cycling is the best representation of the situation we are experiencing. Second, showing Brera, with its famous works, to those who have never been there can only arouse curiosity, and in a year like this, when foreign tourists will be in short supply, it can act as a solicitation for compatriots who are not usually interested in art. Third, the fact that Sagan pretends not to listen to the guide, to be even irritated, underscores the tendency of the average user-especially the Italian, moreover-to consider himself self sufficient. It therefore detects the vulnerability of the user, not ours. It dispels a commonplace.”

“Finally,” the GTI president concludes, “we are in a very delicate moment for our country, in which planning for the future, even the immediate future, is impossible. Forging alliances is the only way. Doing it with irony is the best. We have always been for opening cultural containers to the largest possible audience, debunking commonplaces that would like ’elitist’ attendance at museums and galleries. We want to create closeness, not consolidate distance. The combination of sports and art can work and we agree. We stigmatize as ridiculous and specious the request for immediate cancellation, with a public apology, of the commercial, which we hope will circulate even more and take Italians wherever there is art.”

Italian Tourist Guides: Giro d'Italia in Brera? Alliances are key, marriage of art and sport can work

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