Hiring a guide at Pompeii

It has been a couple of years. The guides were standing around in the same general area of the ticket windows. They had name badges and were asking if some one needed a guide. We spent some time talking with one guide mainly to check is English and to make sure we understood him. His English was excellent he offered a number of options as to time and what we would see. We settled on 3 hrs and a price but don't remember the price. There were six adults in our group. From there it was a very leisurely walk through the site frequently stopping for discussion. Asked a lot of question, received a lot of information. Had a made some notes, took a lot of pictures. Finish at the rest area in the middle, said goodby and we spent the rest exploring on our own and sometimes returning to some previous sites.

I believe all guides in Italy have to be licensed, so those waiting at the entrance to Pompeii are probably legitimate guides.

With a group of that size, one other option you could consider would be to pre-arrange a tour with one of the excellent guides listed in the RS Italy book. Here are a couple of possibilities.....

• http://www.privateguide.com/en/pina/ (Pina Esposito)
• http://www.pompeiitourguide.com/ (Gaetano Manfredi)

We used the RS audio guide and then did some wandering on our own.

Spent the day there.

Thank you all for your quick replies. I'll check out the 2 links.

I've used both of the guides linked to above and they are both good.

So...all guides there have to be licensed. But that doesn't always mean they are good, and you don't really have a way to know that until the tour is underway, or unless you have some experience with classics. I'm a classicist who used to lead tours to Italy for middle schoolers, and I have overheard a LOT of private, licensed guides giving shoddy or sloppy or just plain incorrect information...so it can be a bit of a crapshoot. If you can give up the flexibility of hiring at that moment in order to hire one of the guides mentioned, or another RS recommended guides, then I would say pre-booking one would definitely be worth it.

Hi Joe, what is the RS audio guide? I was considering a guide for Pompeii, but I understand you can use a free app from Ricksteves.com for a detailed guide while seeing Pompeii.