Have iPad, will travel

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Valery Taylor looks at what might be the ultimate guide ‘books’ to the world’s great cities

Museum Planet produces English language iPad-only tours of historic places. Currently they have covered the entire city of Venice, Italy;  New York City and other sites in Spain and the United States.  Tours are purchased in app, out of app or as packages, for instance, ‘All of Venice’ or ‘All of New York City’. The tours consist of expandable pictures, text and short voice narration. They can be stopped and started again, and a viewer can jump around in the tour. The text, always on top of the pictures, can be made to disappear if one wants to view the expandable photos alone. This is of great value because one does not have to flip back and forth between text and the photo.

The results are often spectacular.  In Venice, for example, the tour/guide to San Marco is as complete as any coffee table book and less expensive. Every mural in San Marco is displayed and explained and there is a complete explanation of every panel in the Palo d’oro. There are in total 45 Venetian tours.  The experience is akin to having a private individual tour of the Basilica without the crowds.  Short bios of artists and Doges are provided. Although these bios will not interest the scholar they will certainly help explain the site to the lay reader. Those of a more scholarly persuasion will, however, be interested in the photos and the organization of the material, which in every case is complete and thorough.

The Tour of the Jewish Ghetto is more complete than the real-world guided tours available for tourists.  The Jewish Cemetery on the Lido is also well covered. There is no equivalent book.  In fact, there is no equivalent book to many of these tours.

In the New York City tours, many sites stand out but perhaps some of the original research Museum Planet did on the Obelisk that sits right behind the Metropolitan Museum of art is an eye opener. The 3,800 year old Obelisk was once the most important art object in Alexandria, Egypt. There were riots there when it was removed. Brought to the United Sates in a trade made by William Vanderbilt with the Turkish Khedive, the monument is arguably the most important in the Western hemisphere. And yet today it is mostly ignored.

One of the most interesting tours is that of El Escorial in Spain. The famous frescoed library ceiling by is well photographed and explained thoroughly for the first time, to my knowledge.  There is even a tour of the now closed Fascist ‘Valley of the Fallen’ (with Franco’s tomb).

Tours purchased in app or as All City have a feature called ‘Ad Hoc’, which allows a viewer to search all the downloaded tours (say Titian in Venice) and save the found information into a new tour. Museum Planet says the patent-pending feature is the future of digital publishing. They might just be right. The company plans to add more Spanish tours and Rome next. Their goal is to cover the world. All of Venice and All of New York City are $29.95 and the tours and be purchased individually at prices ranging from $.99 – to $2.99.  The prices are a digital-age deal.