So I'm a guide conferencière. What does this mean?

Nice to meet you, I'm Lívia, a guide accredited by the French Ministry of Culture.

But what does it mean? Let me explain.

Here in France, there are many rules that govern activities linked to tourism. For example, you need a droit de parole to guide in museums. The Louvre Museum’s website says that the “right of expression” is regulated, that is, the act of commenting on works before the public in the museum’s rooms. Only guides certified by the French government are entitled to the droit de parole, meaning only we can present works of art in museums. In some museums, you must pay a fee to exercise the droit de parole, even if you are only guiding one person. In other museums, the fee is only paid for a certain number of people.

To obtain certification, I took a two-year course, with a workload similar to a postgraduate course. At the end, I presented a mémoire (a thesis), a group project and had oral exams in the languages I intended to guide: Spanish, French and English. I was exempt from Portuguese because it is my mother tongue.

It was two years of a lot of study, with a strong focus on French and art history. Did it end there? No. I continue taking several courses, attending seminars, podcasts, online classes... I just took a course on Van Gogh, for example. And I'm studying Louis XIV and Napoleon Bonaparte non-stop. It is a profession in which we can never stop studying.

Still, it was worth it and continues to be worth it. Every smile, every moment of discovery in a museum confirms to me that it was worth it.