DID Moses pose for Michelangelo? Was the Colosseum built as a ruin? And just where is the grave of Christ? If you are thinking of coming to Rome, the city’s chief tour guide has a suggestion: you might bone up on the answers before you arrive.

That way you will avoid wasting your time — and that of your tour guide — by asking “outlandish or embarrassing questions”.

Marco Colzi, head of the tour guides’ trades union, who has himself been accompanying groups around Rome for years, said that guides tried to be patient when asked ignorant or peculiar questions. “It is our job to be helpful.”

But patience tends to stretch to its limits when visitors ask whether Moses had posed for the recently restored sculpture of him by Michelangelo in the church of St Peter in Chains.

Visitors often asked where Jesus was buried, and reacted “sceptically” when told that although St Peter and St Paul lived and died in Rome, Christ’s Resurrection took place in Jerusalem, Signor Colzi said. “They look incredulous when we tell them that Jesus never came to Rome at all,” he said.

Signor Colzi, who was launching a campaign to “raise the level of knowledge” about Rome, said that British, French and German visitors tended to be best informed, “although for some reason the Spanish have a lower level of knowledge”. He claimed that Australians and Asians knew a great deal about their own countries but not much about Rome. Among American tourists it was — oddly — those of Italian origin who revealed the greatest ignorance, he told Il Messaggero, the Rome daily.

One guide said that many visitors relied on supposed facts gleaned from Hollywood films. He said that the Sistine Chapel, named after Pope Sixtus IV, for whom it was built at the end of the 15th century, was frequently referred to as the “Sixteen Chapel”, especially by Americans. “They ask me where the other 15 are.”

At the Pantheon custodians have put up a notice reading: “The hole in the roof is always open, and when it rains, the floor gets wet”.

The campaign follows a drive by the tour guides to protect their profession from “impostors”. Last month an Italian woman was fined €172 (£120) for pointing out the historic and artistic beauty of the Trevi Fountain to tourists without authorisation.

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