Art runs in my family. My father was a painter and paintings restorer, and I grew up learning to look at pictures the way restorers do: closely, patiently, curious about every detail and every choice the artist made. I have spent my life turning that way of looking into a profession.

I am a London Blue Badge Tourist Guide (MITG) and an art historian, with a PhD from the Warburg Institute, University of London, where I studied how people in Renaissance Italy used images to remember, to persuade and to believe. Before qualifying in London, I worked for nearly a decade as a licensed guide in Rome and the Vatican, leading everything from intimate private visits to large international groups through some of the most demanding sites in the world.

Valu Arts Tours was born from a simple conviction: a great tour is not a list of facts, but a way of seeing. Whether we meet in the National Gallery or the Wallace Collection, at Westminster Abbey, St Paul’s Cathedral or the Tower of London, my job is to teach you the language of images, the symbols, stories and meanings hiding in plain sight, so that you leave looking at art, and at London, differently.

I guide in English and Italian, for individuals and small groups.