March 2002: Vol. 81, No. 2
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When in Florence . . .
Shelton Bellew's (ABJ '95) audio tapes are the perfect way to tour the antiquities

by Amy Laughinghouse
In the shadow of the Santa Maria del Fiore at the heart of Florence, Italy, a tour guide expounds on the beauty of the marble cathedral, which took 600 years to complete. In perfect English, he addresses the history of Florence and its palazzos and squares and also dispenses practical advice, such as where to find "a true Italian coffee" or a cheap pint of beer and how to negotiate a lower price for the faux-Prada purses hawked by street vendors. If you didn't catch what the guide said the first time, he's happy to repeat it again and again—or at least until the batteries in your Walkman die.



Bellew's little tour tape empire is spreading to cities like Rome, Venice, and perhaps Paris.
This eloquent tour-leader-on-tape is called "the cicerone," meaning "a guide who explains the antiquities," and he's the alter-ego of Shelton Bellew (ABJ '95), who hatched the tour-tapes idea while he and his mother, an Atlanta realtor, were touring the Uffizi, a famous Florentine museum.

"We were talking about the fact that on Sunday, everything's closed in Italy, and everyone goes home to eat from 2 until 4," says Bellew, who was reared just outside of Rome—Georgia, that is. "You can't get a guide or any help. We thought, Wouldn't it be nice if there were a way to visit the city on your own?"

Bellew, who lives beside the Arno River near Florence, created an outline of the city's most notable monuments, pored over guidebooks and Internet sites, and sought input from people on both sides of the Atlantic.

By June 2000, "The Cicerone: Walk With Me Self Guided Audio Walking Tour of Florence" was in gift shops and museum stores. Pisa/Lucca and Siena followed in January 2001, and tapes of Venice and Rome are next. The tours are also available at www.bellewtours.com for $16.95 each.

Each tour tape package features a map of the city, a historic timeline, and a photo of Bellew decked out like a hip pilgrim in black jeans and a broad-brimmed hat. Like St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, he clutches a grapevine walking stick salvaged from a pergola behind his parents' east Cobb home.

The image of the iconic wanderer is fitting for Bellew, who spent his sophomore year of college in Lyon, France, and another six months in Chile on a Coca-Cola internship. He came to Florence in February 1999 after feeling unfulfilled in an Atlanta PR job.

"A friend said, 'Why don't you head to a country you've never been to before and figure out what you want to do,'" explains Bellew, whose radio-ready voice has adopted the lilting tones and elongated vowels of Italian. "I thought, Well, if I do get serious about a job and have a family one day, now's the time to go out and have this healthy adventure."

Bellew was fluent in French and Spanish, but he arrived in Florence not knowing a word of Italian. He quickly picked up the language—and a job teaching English and French to the Antinoris, a well-known family of winemakers. He had been in Florence six months and was ready to return home when he had his epiphany at the Uffizi.

In between working on tours and tutoring, Bellew hosts a daily two-minute radio show called "The Cicerone Break" in which he disseminates information about cultural events and exhibits. He plans to offer his Cicerone tapes in other languages and to include cities like Paris, Barcelona, and maybe even Washington.

He's also working with Scott Shamp, director of the New Media Institute at UGA, to develop alternative methods of distributing the tours, such as MP3 files that can be downloaded from the Internet and played on a hand-held computer or Pocket PC. And—take note UGA students—Bellew would like to recruit college students who are eager to have their artwork featured on a Cicerone map or packaging.
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A similar version of this story ran in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which granted reprint rights