the ‘Gladiator guide’ who shows Hollywood stars the secrets of the Eternal City

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Alexander Mariotti was trying to make it as a historian in Rome when he got a call from the US embassy, where he had given a lecture on ancient history. An official wondered if he might like to show some American tourists around. Intrigued by the secrecy over their names, he agreed.

“You can imagine how taken aback I was when I showed up and it was Bill Gates,” says Mariotti, who was only 25 at the time.

The billionaire Microsoft founder was more interested in Leonardo da Vinci than the ancients (he had once blown $30.8mn on one of the polymath’s notebooks) and less concerned with smalltalk than his then wife Melinda. “She was incredibly versed in history and afterwards she asked if I would mind if she gave my number out, and again I didn’t think anything of it,” Mariotti adds from his home in Rome.

Twenty years later, his phone is still ringing. When he’s not busy in his day job as a lecturer and historical consultant on TV and film productions, including the new Gladiator movie, he moonlights as a tour guide to the stars. His hundreds of clients have also included Tom Cruise and the Kardashians.

“I don’t advertise and I don’t carry one of those tour guide’s flags,” says Mariotti, who is now 46. “I like to show people local experiences. Sure, we’ll pass the Pantheon but then I might take you down a side street to my friend’s shop, which has a 2,000-year-old structure underneath it that nobody knows about.”

Mariotti was born to Italian parents outside Glasgow, where his father worked for a chemicals firm, before spending his early childhood in Rome. After completing his schooling back in Scotland, he returned to Rome and now splits his time between the Italian capital and London.

It was like a scene out of ‘The Walking Dead’, every so often you turned around and the crowd had got bigger, they were following us

As a child, he remembers playing football with his friend in the Colosseum, not far from his grandfather’s house, when you could still wander through its travertine arches. But it was the first Gladiator movie, in 2000, that sparked a fascination with ancient Rome — and the truth behind the Hollywood vision.

Mariotti immersed himself in literature and got the first of dozens of screen consulting gigs on the HBO series Rome, which came out in 2005. He advises on weaponry, language and customs. The call from the embassy came at around the same time.

Now, for a fee that he prefers not to disclose (“let’s just say you don’t have to be Bill Gates to afford me”) he takes people for tours away from the crowds and queues for Instagrammable vantage points. “These films are a great moment to start a discussion about the ancient world,” says Mariotti, whose black beard and muscular physique lend him a slightly gladiatorial air. “But I’ve always seen myself as an antidote to the touristy side of Rome.”

If Mariotti is having his tiramisu and eating it by participating in the Hollywoodisation of Rome, while also dangling the keys to the “real city”, he’s having too much fun to worry about it. Exploiting contacts he has built up on location, he often unlocks doors for his clients, most of whom are not famous (word-of-mouth marketing has recently delivered a Canadian Mountie, a group of Mormons and Melinda Gates’s interior designer).

While “geeking out” on Gladiator trivia with an excitable Tom Cruise, Mariotti took him to the site of Julius Caesar’s murder (the ruins of the Curia of Pompey, an ancient meeting hall, have since been opened to tourists). On another tour, Dustin Hoffman welled up before a Michaelangelo in a private chapel. “It was an incredible moment, just me and him in this little church,” Mariotti says.

In 2018, when Kourtney Kardashian showed up “like she was dressed for the Oscars”, she and Mariotti strayed into a crowd near the Spanish Steps. “It was like a scene out of The Walking Dead, every so often you turned around and the crowd had got bigger and were just following us,” he says.

Mariotti’s favourite spots for refreshment (or at least those he agrees to share) include La Rosetta, a family-run fish restaurant near the Pantheon, and Hostaria Antica Roma, which serves ancient recipes on the cobbled Via Appia.

Russell Crowe himself joined Mariotti for dinner at La Rosetta last year. The Italian brought along his then six-year-old son, Maximus. At the end of the meal, Crowe turned to the boy and put on his best Gladiator voice while gripping his little forearm in a Roman handshake. “Always remember, Maximus, strength and honour,” Mariotti recalls him saying. “It really touched me but of course the great thing was that my son was not even mildly impressed.”

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