About
CROCUS
Guides and Tours in Florence Tuscany
Mission
Crocus is a project for slow-paced tourism in Florence and Tuscany.
The ultimate goal is to offer alternative tours so tour alternativi that tourism becomes the means for a new sociality.
Places, like houses, are alive when things happen in them, and things happen when people meet; we want to bring back to life forgotten villages, unvisited museums, unwalked gardens by letting people meet there. All this while respecting our values: ethics, honesty, transparency, simplicity, respect for the environment and diversity. This is our social tour revolution!
Team
Licensed Tour Guides
We have combined our skills to create a tour operator able to offer guided tours and alternative experiences in Florence and Tuscany. Our activities are always conducted by a licensed tour guide and managed by experienced staff. Our tourism is ethical and social and we want to pay the utmost attention to the peculiarities, beliefs, desires, expectations of those who decide to come on tour with us. Our proposals are constantly being updated, but our top activities are always available - ex: Culture and Sociality, Great Classics etc.
If the itinerary you have in mind or the place you want to visit is not among our proposals, we can create a custom tour so feel free to contact us to discuss the details!
Benedetta
Licensed Guide | Licensed Environmental Hiking Guide
I am a tour guide in Florence, but this has not always been my dream. As a child, when I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I replied 'a journalist' and I tried. I graduated in journalism and worked for a very short time in a small local newspaper but at some point I realized that this was not my path, so I attended the guide qualification course, then I packed my bags and went to London for a couple of years, perhaps the best experience of my life. And now my English is excellent, or so they tell me. I said that I work as a guide, but to be honest, being a guide is not a real job, because is so much fun to me. Finally, everything was going quite well until covid, which at first messed up the cards, but actually gave us one of the most precious things we were losing: time, time for us, time to think. And that's how our project was born, a bit as a joke, almost without believing it so much ourselves, but here we are: questioning the tourism style proposed so far, thinking about a slower and more authentic tourism, which is respectful of the environment and the city. I say it can be done!
Chiara Jean
Tour Leader and Travel Agent
I mainly work on booking management, reservations and customer relations. It's not the profession I imagined to do, I arrived here by chance and after years of working my way up in the tourism sector. Shortly after graduating I started working as a tour leader and after a few years I began working in the office, where I gained experience on reservation management and customer service. As challenging as it was, I can now say that I had a lot of fun. I love Florence, I was born and raised here, but in the last years tourism has changed and it has changed my city: tourists no longer have time to enjoy the area and appreciate the values of our history and cultural richness. In fact, I was no longer sure I wanted to continue working in this field. But during 2020, between quarantines, talking with some friends and colleagues, we realized that we wanted to use our knowledge to create something different in this field. All five of us want and need to propose new experiences about our city: something that is fun, that creates moments of sociability between people and that is respectful of the environment and places. We are convinced that it is possible to make ethical and sustainable tourism and we have the skills to do so hence the birth of "Crocus". Let the Social Tour Revolution begin!
Francesca
Accountant and Technical Director
I manage accounting and administration for the cooperative, but I like to put my nose into every aspect of life at "Crocus". In the last ten years, I have worked in the tourism sector, a very interesting sector, which has given me the opportunity to go beyond my role as an accountant: for example, following one of my passions, craft beer, I have created, together with my colleague Chiara, a beer tasting tour that unravels downtown Florence. I am also passionate about good wine and good food (vegetarian, because it is true that you can eat well, even without meat or fish), to be enjoyed in some relaxing corner of our beautiful Tuscany. A group of trusted friends and colleagues and the desire to create something authentic that reflected my passions, pushed me, at the end of 2020, to undertake the path to become Technical Director of Travel Agency; a qualification that I used for the project of "Crocus Trip", which then became a cooperative society, in order to do business in an egalitarian and participatory way that also improves our working conditions. For me, working in Crocus means always learning new things from each other, having fun being the guinea pig on the tours that the expert minds of my colleagues have created, discovering and letting people discover hidden gems of Florence and Tuscany, sharing, esteem, mutual respect and above all, respect for the values in which I believe, without compromise.
Francesca
Tour Guide
“By nature I am strong and sweet yet/and those who stay and work like me". An ancient motto on the coat of arms of my hometown of Certaldo which, for those who don't know, is an onion, but I think it can also apply to me. But let's start from the beginning. My name is Francesca and I am a tour guide of Florence. I was born in the province of Florence, I graduated in Communication and Marketing, and after a few years spent in Emilia Romagna among lambrusco and erbazzone, I came back to Tuscany. After various work experiences in communication, I said goodbye to the 4Ps to follow my passions: one of them is history so I became a tour guide. It was a big change for me, but one that I would do a thousand times over. I consider myself fortunate because with my job I am surrounded, on a daily basis, by the beauty that has been left to us by those who have passed through this land before us and that will remain even after us. For this reason, I think it is fundamental to understand (and make people understand) that the land we live in, is the fruit of the lives and experiences of those who have gone before us and for this reason it deserves to be respected. For me, being a guide doesn't mean listing dates and names or showing that I've learned the Treccani by heart, but making the traveler an active participant in a territory that has not just one, but many stories to tell. Passion and energy are not lacking, I'm working on the Treccani....
Valentina
Tour Guide
I was born and raised in the land of Masaccio, Petrarca and Marsilio Ficino, in Valdarno, when I was 20 I moved to Florence and at 24 I became an official guide of this spectacular city and it is undoubtedly one of the best choices I've ever made in my life. When I was a child my father said that I should have become a politician, maybe because I wouldn't shut up even when I was sleeping. Today, I could explain to my dad that being a tour guide means being in politics, but he wouldn't understand. I do politics every time I take a group to visit a building of historical importance that has been abandoned by everyone, even by the institutions; I do politics when I take my clients to a producer who offers only genuine food; when I guide people to meet in their own city; or when I organize, together with the participants, a recycling collection within the guided tour. For me this is doing politics because it leaves a mark and as far as I'm concerned it's a step further towards my ideal of economy and society.
Tour operator
Crocus Trip - Social Tour Revolution is a tour operator, a travel agency authorized to design and sell tourist packages, guided tours and excursions for every taste, guaranteeing professionalism and safety to all participants.
Guided tours are carried out exclusively by Licensed Tour Guides of Florence and Provinceprofessionals in continuous training on the peculiar aspects of this territory: history, art, cuisine, oenology and folklore..
Taking a guided tour in Florence without an authorized guide would be like eating Pappa al Pomodoro in Los Angeles.
Our staff includes Environmental Hiking Guides, also with a license, who provide the necessary technical assistance in visiting natural environments, including man-made environments, eco-environmental museums, in order to illustrate the elements, characteristics, ecological relationships, the link with history and cultural traditions, landscape attractions, and to provide, in addition, elements of environmental education.
To make an excursion without an environmental guide is like venturing on a glacier wearing flip-flops.
Our tour leaders have a long experience, they also have a regular license, they will ensure the necessary assistance, providing significant information and news of tourist and cultural interest on the areas of transit, remaining at your disposal for the duration of the trip. Travelling without a tour leader is like going into the desert with a compass found in the easter egg. bussola trovata nell’uovo di pasqua.
