What is HistoryCity?
HistoryCity (formerly Hidden Cities) brings the streets to life with immersive trails on GPS-triggered historic maps. Our collection of free, award-winning apps, developed at the University of Exeter, lets you discover the hidden heritage of cities in the UK and Europe, guided by historical characters who link major landmarks and sites off the beaten track to tales from their own lives and times.
Focusing on untold stories from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries, our research-led apps turn conventional tours on their head. Following in the footsteps of a historical guide, audiences get an insight into the experience of real people, their concerns, hopes, and fears as they navigated life in their cities. These critically constructed first-person perspectives are combined with expert commentary on the worlds of the past.
Our team is led by Professor Fabrizio Nevola and Dr David Rosenthal, historians from the University of Exeter. Each app is developed in collaboration with museum, higher education and heritage partners, and our trails turn their expertise into mobile public history narratives that reveal hidden histories of place. They also virtually relocate museum artefacts to the places they were once associated with, linking them to the social and cultural worlds that gave them meaning.
We currently offer free immersive trails in 10 cities: Venice, Copenhagen, Exeter, Florence, Valencia, Hamburg, Trento, Deventer, Landshut and Tours.
In 2024 our team launched the HistoryScapes app, a parallel project in partnership with the National Trust (UK), bringing landscape heritage to life at Trust locations around Britain.
Meet the Team
Fabrizio Nevola
HistoryCity project lead
I am a Professor and Chair of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter, where I’m also Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies.
I specialise in the urban and architectural history of early modern Italy, and my most recent research looks at the street as a social space, the urban iconography that often binds main streets into a coherent whole and the relations between public and private self-representation.
In 2022 I published Street Life in Renaissance Italy (Yale University Press) and I am the author of Siena: Constructing the Renaissance City (Yale University Press). I co-edited the open-access Hidden Cities: Urban Space, Geolocated apps, and Public History (Routledge, 2022). I have published numerous articles and other collections, and co-authored the exhibition catalogue for Renaissance Siena: Art for a City at the National Gallery in London.
David Rosenthal
HistoryCity co-director
I specialise in the social history of early modern Italy, and public history and immersive storytelling with mobile media.
My research focuses on public space, urban ritual and social change between 1500 and 1700, themes that underpinned my work on Florence’s carnival ‘kingdoms’, published as Kings of the Street: Power, Community and Ritual in Renaissance Florence (Brepols, 2015). I co-edited the open-access Hidden Cities: Urban Space, Geolocated Apps, and Public History (Routledge, 2022) and Disaster in the Early Modern World: Examinations, Representations, Interventions (Routledge, 2023). I am a research fellow at the University of Exeter.
Interview about HistoryCity: The future of place-based digital storytelling.
Feeling inspired?
Get in touch to transform your research into trails on an immersive app
HistoryCity Apps 