Underground Rome History Tour: The Fall and Rise of the Roman Empire with San Clemente Basilica

this was my wife's tour-she said it was ok and that the docent was pretty bland. my rating of 4 might be more generous than she would give.

Richard's tour was chock full of historical facts and enlivened with anecdotes--having visited the sites on this tour as often as he has, Richard could provide us with insight into the past and ongoing restoration to some of these sites, which we found very interesting. It gave us a more rounded sense of how current policies and changing initiatives, red tape and uncertain funding can sometimes dictate what we see and how much gets preserved, etc.

I want to be very fair to Patrizia. She is a charming individual who is clearly very knowledgeable about the San Clemente church. However, she did not give a Context tour!!! The language from your tour description reads "... we frame these in an engaging, scholarly discussion of the social forces present during a very important period of transformation." Patrizia did not even mention the words "social forces" the entire three hours we were together. Instead, she gave an incredibly detailed tour of the San Clemente church, a detailed tour of the frescoes in the SS Quattro Coronati church, and a much more limited discussion of the remainder of the church. I can't comment about how she might have handled a visit to the Giovanni e Paolo site since the tour ended before we got to this site. (This appears to be typical. At the beginning of the tour, she announced that only once in all the times she has given the tour has she been able to include all three sites. I'm rather surprised this fact hasn't surfaced in earlier surveys, and the problem addressed by now.) After taking Patrizia's tour, I now understand the relationship between the walls and the sizes of the three churches that stood on the San Clemente site. I have a great appreciation for the engineering that went into the construction of each church, built as they were on top of one another. I took away a great appreciation of artistic skill of the fresco painter in the Coronati chapel. The next day, visiting the Orvieto duomo, I looked at the choir placed in the middle of the church with new understanding as the result of Patrizia's tour. So I clearly learned a lot. Unfortunately, I know nothing about the Fall and the Rise of Rome. Patrizia may think she covered these topics. I can only recall her including one sentence about the fortification of the Quattro Coronati because of invaders, including the name of the one particular invader. However, she spent more time translating the Latin and the vernacular inscriptions of a fresco showing the donor of the frescoes in San Clemente than she spent on the stated theme of the tour. In fact, at the end of the tour, I went up to her and explicitly asked how what we had seen related to the Fall and Rise of Rome. The look on her face told me she was very thrown by my question. Either she thought I was one of the stupidest individuals to ever take her tour since she deeply believe she covered that topic or she simply had no good answer to my question. She managed to give a one-sentence, perfunctory answer that basically said that the power transferred from the Empire to the church. Well, I already knew that from the tour description on the web site. In fact, my husband and I learned more about the Fall and Rise of Rome from our Classical Rome tour than we did from Patrizia's, and there was no expectation we would cover this topic given Classical theme of our Sunday tour. Our docent there mentioned -- with no prompting or questioning from Philip or me -- that after the decay of the Empire, several popes worked to provide the coherence that Empire had previously created. Then, the popes worked together with Charlemagne, a secular leader, to form the Holy Roman Empire thinking that sharing some power with a secular ruler was better than continuing to live with chaos. If what Olivia shared is what should have been covered in the Fall and Rise tour, I guarantee you that Patrizia never mentioned any papal attempts to restore order or the creation of the Holy Roman Empire. I realize that each tour guide has the knowledge and autonomy to offer a tour that matches his/her particular strengths. I also realize that we could take the same tour twice from two different guides and receive remarkably dissimilar tours. I interpret this to mean that one guide may emphasize art while another might emphasize social history. However, I do not think this flexibility should go so far as to offer a tour in which the essential theme is ignored yet that is what happened with the 7 June tour. Some day, we would actually like to take the advertised tour because we remain truly fascinated to learn the story behind the fall and rise of Rome. Before that happens we think Context Travel should re-evaluate whether or not the three destinations listed on the web site can be successfully covered in a three-hour tour and whether these destinations are the best ones to illustrated the "... social forces present during a very important period of transformation." Based on what I learned on the tour the two places we visited were picked for no apparent reason.