My name is Andrea Renieri and I was born in Montepulciano in 1966. I have a degree in History of Art from the Siena University and in 1999 I qualified as a tourist guide. To learn English I lived for a year in England and the United States, where I spent a wonderful period of my life. In 1999 I started work as a tour guide in collaboration with the Pienza tourist office but now I work for myself. I studied history of art because of a personal passion and I looked for, in my life, to do a job that could be based on my interests: to have a profession that one likes is a good thing. I learnt about art from books and museums, but above all from visits to the studios of some artists such as my friend Gianni Cacciarini, a Florentine painter who has a great technical capacity (some of his paintings and etchings are conserved in the Uffizi Museum in Florence) and who is the painter of my portrait that you can see reproduced in the photo above. I have also had the pleasure to know his master, the famous painter Pietro Annigoni. I love realistic painting (as well I also appreciated some forms of more avant-garde painting) and so I am always inclined towards painters who paint in a traditional technical style, which via with my work I often have to explain to people. Another font from which I have learnt is from my history of art and restorer friends.