tour guides for one day to highlight Florence, Venice, Rome

I have used TripAdvisor to find private guides and semi-private day tours with great results.

cryer,

I'd suggest having a look at the RS Italy 2016 guidebook as there should be guides listed there for each of the cities you mentioned.

One guide that I would highly recommend in Rome is Francesca Caruso. She's an outstanding guide but I'd suggest booking early as she's very popular.

Context Travel does private and small group (six people, maximum) tours in all those cities. I've use the multiple times in each of those cities (and elsewhere) and only had great experiences.

In Florence we spent half a day with Federico, and really enjoyed his tour. He will schedule the half/full day tour based on your preferences.

https://www.facebook.com/Federico-tour-guide-in-Florence-190265274325613/

I also agree getting Francesca Caruso for your tour of Rome. She is an amazing tour guide.

We used Easitalytours (www.easitalytours.com) for our 3 hour Vatican tour and a whole day driving tour of Rome. Both tours were well worth it! With the Vatican tour, we skipped all the lines and got a lot more out of the tour than we would of if we had gone on our own. Our guide (Massimo) was awesome and even got our two teenagers laughing and interested. The driving tour of Rome was awesome! The guide (Max) picked us up at our hotel and took us door to door to all of the sights. He also found us a great place for lunch which was one of the best meals we had the whole trip. It's kind of pricey to hire a guide, but if your time in Rome is limited, it's well worth it. I believe they do tours in other cities as well.

We used Walks of Italy, which gives a 10% discount with a mention of RS.