Do your New Year’s resolutions include a trip to Rome? Let the pilgrim beware.

As anyone who has been to the Eternal City knows, tour guide companies here vary widely in quality. The guides are often newly arrived students who, short of cash, have found the insatiable demand for guiding tourists around the city’s vast heritage to be an easy remedy for their penury.

That is not to say their tours are meaningless or a waste of time, but many tend toward the superficial and the misleading. It is not uncommon to hear, to give one example, that treasures from ancient Rome were “stolen by Christians” and placed in churches — giving the mistaken impression that Christians were pillaging Philistines when, in fact, the Roman Empire had long fallen and the city had lain in ruins for centuries.

Now, however, three American students at Rome’s Pontifical Angelicum University are trying to set the record straight and inject some solid, orthodox Catholic faith into Rome tour-guiding. Their company, Eternal City Tours, was founded in 2003. Michael Sineni, Paul Encinias and Gabriel Radle are, according to their publicity literature, “nerds who can’t keep their heads out of books nor catch the one-way flight back home (much to our mothers’ discontent).”

Between them they are studying theology, philosophy, ecclesiology and archaeology. Their studies, they say, give them “a passion for their faith and a deep love for the city of Rome.” For Sineni, 29, the tour company “represents the long-awaited and, until now, untapped source of guidance to Catholic heritage in Rome.”

On their menu are “philosophy tours” that combine Socrates, Plato and Aristotle with “great views and a bottle of wine”; a “Serendipity” tour, which takes you to places “most tourists don’t find”; and a “Theological Tour de Force” that seeks to explain the meaning of tricky dogmatic terms such as the Incarnation, the Immaculate Conception, indulgences and transubstantiation. Visitors can also create an itinerary of their own.

For Encinias, a half-Hispanic, half-American Indian from Colorado, the trio’s academic backgrounds are what make them stand out in a competitive market.

He explains, “They are often products of modern art history or came out of a communications background, so they’re good talkers. They know how to put a spin on things.”

Evangelizing Excursions

Is there a danger that, as students, the three are not yet experts in the fields they are covering?

“We’re on top of our subjects,” answers Encinias, a student of philosophy and Christian archaeology. “We’re not parrots, reeling off a lot of facts; we’re submersed in it all the time. Yes we’re nerds, but we’re not full-time students. We’re doing advanced studies.”

All three bring distinct backgrounds to their work. Sineni trained in psychology before leaving Chicago to study theology in Rome. Encinias came to the Eternal City with just $80 in his pocket after trying his hand at acting and working as a farmer on his grandfather’s ranch. Radle, 21, left San Antonio for Rome as part of his discernment for the priesthood.

Rome is part of their own faith formation — one they’re eager to share. What’s more, they see their guide work as part of an evangelical mission.

“We feel tours of St. Peter’s and the Vatican are a perfect opportunity for apologetics, not just for Roman Catholics but also for tourists who really want to learn about the city,” says Sineni. “We see it very much as a work of evangelization, an alternative to relativist, secularist and nihilist trends in modern society.”

(Asked for an example of their approach in action, Encinias says: “I tell each party I take to see Michelangelo’s Pieta to look carefully at the hand of Mary. I help them realize that is a hand that gave the salvation of mankind. Tourists appreciate it when they’re given meaning over fact.” )

He also says guides from other tour companies have been taking Eternal City tours to learn more about the faith behind the facades.

Pointing Heavenward

Occasionally, the trio encounters tourists who come with pre-conceived, negative notions of the Vatican. “You’ll have people who’ll walk into St. Peter’s Basilica and say it’s ugly,” explains Encinias. “Or, as one girl said, ‘Gold is cold.’” 

That’s when the students see an opportunity to put forward an alternative view visitors may not have considered. “We tell them that it’s pointing to greater things, to God and heaven, where the riches are real.” 

One of Encinias’ firmly held convictions is that beauty is objective.

“Like everything, beauty has been relativized,” he explains. “It is ludicrous to say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, that it is subjective. If something’s truly beautiful then it is beautiful all the time because, as the Greek philosophers taught us, a golden ratio exists that makes it beautiful.”

The consequences of relativizing beauty will, he believes, eventually result in people having no concept of what beauty is. And that is something he regrets witnessing in Rome everyday. “I have never seen a city with such beauty, such living history, and yet so much irreverence.”

The students are clearly proud to be studying at the same university where one Karol Wojtyla received his doctorate when he was about the same age. Much of their earnings are used to fund their studies. Meanwhile, their future plans are to expand their business by writing a book or producing a documentary on the city.

For their mothers, it seems, their sons’ homecoming will have to wait a little while longer yet.

Edward Pentin writes

from Rome.

Information

Eternal City Tours

eternalcitytours.com

[email protected]