What is HistoryCity?
Unlike conventional city guides, HistoryCity aims to turn public history and heritage into an adventure. In our immersive ‘time travel’ trails, plotted on GPS-triggered historic maps, figures from the past bring the streets to life with tales from their own lives and times.
These critically constructed ‘guides’, voiced by actors, delve into untold stories from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries. Their perspectives on everyday life and extraordinary events connect you to the city’s past in a new way as you visit both major landmarks and sites off the beaten track.
At each trail site there is also expert commentary and images, which virtually relocate museum artefacts to the places they were associated with, and to the social and cultural worlds that gave them meaning. You can dive deeper by linking out to a brief web article at each site (Stories).
Every trail is developed as a collaboration between our history team at the University of Exeter and project partners: museums and archives, and higher education, heritage and civic organisations. Whatever the story, we strive to turn material, social and cultural history into compelling situated experiences that expand our sense of tangible and intangible heritage.
HistoryCity currently offers 25 trails in 11 cities and towns: Venice, Copenhagen, Exeter, Florence, Valencia, Hamburg, Trento, Deventer, Landshut, Tours, and Pieve Tesino. We also produce the HistoryScapes app in partnership with the National Trust (UK), bringing landscape heritage to life at, to date, 4 locations around England. Our apps are powered by industry leader Calvium in Bristol. For details about collaboration, and to find out about the education version of the app, click these page links.
In 2025, HistoryCity was awarded the prestigious Heritage in Motion international prize for virtual and augmented reality. Hidden Florence, our first app, won the App Award at the Conference on Cultural Heritage and New Technologies, Vienna (2019). Hidden Florence 3D was winner of UK App of the Year AR/3D for innovative use of 3D/AR in 2020 and was shortlisted for the same category in the SPARKies 2020.
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 trail director
I specialise in the social history of early modern Italy and public history 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 brigades, 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.
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