My name is Mario Messineo and I work as licensed guide in Florence. I was born in 1974 in Milan. Eventually left for an opportunity to study abroad through the Erasmus Program.Toward the end of my studies, I spent time in Normandy writing my thesis in cultural geography, and I couldn’ t have imagined the places where, in the coming years, I would live; I couldn’t have imagined Munich and Paris.I didn’ t think that I would teach Italian to Germans in Germany, welcome Italians at the Tourist Office of Dijon in France or that, one day, I would work as Guide in Florence and accompany those French people and Germans in whose culture and country I had already lived for more than ten years.I couldn’ t even imagine that one day I would choose Florence as my adopted city.
It is precisely Florence which first heard Dante’s verses, which let the Ancients come alive and the modern man with them, where arts, literature and language flourished once again; where Masaccio used perspective in painting for the first time, which had just been reinvented by Brunelleschi where Donatello refused to sell one of his artworks to a Genoese merchant because the man wanted it priced according to labor involved, like the most ordinary handmade object, and not according to its true aesthetic value.
My artistic sensibility developed mostly in France through contact with the Italian artists of the Louvre, where I worked as a copyist. In Paris, I also had the opportunity to hang out at studios of local painters and sculptors, learning to draw and paint the human figure. On the other side of the Alps, the constant call to the tradition of my fatherland stimulated me to deepen my studies of the Renaissance in Florence. Today Florence is the city where many far-flung cultures meet up and find themselves. Those cultures, which form the miraculous world mosaic in which we all live and move, are what nurtures and sustains my work as a tour guide. I dedicate my task to all visitors of Florence and thank them for bringing great wonder and admiration to this city, which, though it may be today at the border of the European exchanges, it was once the “new Athens”. Brought here not by birth, but through my life’s path, Florence is the city where I am privileged to live and live on.
