Hidden Venice: the app to discover the city through the lens of history

Finding your way around the campi and calli through Google Maps is what (almost) all the millions of tourists who visit the city of Venice every year do. How many of them can imagine the incredible events that marked the very places they passed through centuries before?

Hidden Venice is an immersive app that guides us to discover the city by following an interactive version of Ludovico Ughi's historical map (1729). Thus, we can visit iconic places, bridges, and churches outside the classic tourist routes and experience the city straddling past and present.

Available for free on AppStore and GooglePlay, the Hidden Venice smartphone app is a high-level scientific IT product, created by Prof. Fabrizio Nevola (University of Exeter) with a research team, starting with a visiting professorship at Ca' Foscari University Venice at the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities (VeDPH), which funded the project. It is the latest in the HistoryCity series by historians and historians from the Department of Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies at the University of Exeter.

We can choose three stories set in Venice between the 16th and 18th centuries, each based on research by experts in the field, through three different routes: 'Venice Unmasked:1730', 'Boats, Bridges and Battles:1639', and 'City of Refuge:1572'.

The 'tourist guides' are characters-narrators of the time, such as Capitano Zuanne Biancafior, a member of the Executors against Blasphemy in the city, engaged in the hunt against a serial harasser of women; or the apprentice ship-builder Sebastiano or Elena, a Greek woman who takes us on a journey from the harbour near St. Mark's Square to the Arsenale shipyards.

"Venice is a city where almost all people who visit use the map of their phone to find their way around, so Hidden Venice is ideally placed to offer alternative routes in the city using that same device that is so familiar to everyone," explains Prof. Nevola. - Instead of avoiding canals and crossing bridges using the Google or Apple map, the spectacular 18th-century map created by Ludovico Ughi offers a fun and engaging way to experience the city through a historical lens. In this first version of the app, users download and follow three very different itineraries. With Sebastiano, you will discover Dorsoduro: you will find out how to take a traghetto (the gondola ferry rarely used by tourists), how the residents of the past stocked up on water, and how at certain times of the year the bridges became the playground for the so-called 'battagliole' on the bridges".

Prof. Fabrizio Nevola presented the Hidden Venice app at Ca' Foscari’s CFZ and online on 10 July during the event Making the Renaissance Public: Digital Approaches to Urban History [ITA]. This event was part of a series connected to the Venice Summer School in Digital and Public Humanities Venice.