Don't just visit the city.Enter the story.
A city is an anthology. Choose a book, an author, or the whole literary life of a place, and walk it with the passages read aloud where they happened. Paris first — then Florence, Venice, and the cities of the page to come.
Readable Cities is coming to your phone
The full experience — narration that begins the moment you reach each stop, walking directions between them, and maps that work offline — arrives as an app for iPhone and Android. Leave your email and we'll tell you the day it lands.
No spam — a single message when the app is ready.
Three doors into a city
Every tour is built the same way — scenes, homes, cafés, and the sea — but you decide which thread you follow.
By book
Walk the locations, scenes and atmosphere of a single work — the streets a story actually moves through.
By author
Follow the writer's homes, hotels, cafés, influences and working life — where the sentences were made.
By city
An anthology tour — several writers across centuries, layered over the same squares, bridges and harbours.
You set the pace, the depth, and the stops
Pick a city, book or author, then tell the app how you want to move through it. The route rebuilds around your choices.
- One hour — a single square, well told
- Two hours — a neighbourhood
- Half a day — the whole arc
- Walking only, or walking plus transit
- No spoilers — setting, not plot
- Tell me everything — the whole scene
- Author's life, book scenes, or both
- Audio narration, or read it yourself
- Lunch and coffee stops
- Bookshops worth the detour
- Museums tied to the tour
- Directions to the next stop
The same corner, told the way you asked for it
Stand at a location and the app gives you the scene, a narrated passage, and what the writer actually saw. Press play to hear this stop the way you would on the street.
We keep these separate. At Notre-Dame, the tour walks the real cathedral and Hugo's imagined medieval city — and marks where the animated film softened his ending.
Notre-Dame de Paris
Colette: So Much Disobedience
Five stops across the Paris of Colette — one woman taking possession of her own life, street by street.
Where It All Started — Colette and Claudine
Pleasure and Pain
The Disobedient Woman
Later Days
Bowed Heads
Then continue into The Illuminated City — the anthology walk from Hugo's towers to Balzac's challenge, six writers layered over the same streets.
We start with Paris
Paris opens the series — its greatest writers are public domain, so Hugo, Balzac, Zola and Baudelaire can be read aloud freely. The Italian cities follow.
- Colette: So Much Disobedience — the flagship walk
- The Illuminated City — Hugo to Balzac
- Hugo — Notre-Dame & Les Misérables
- Balzac's Human Comedy
- Zola's Paris — Les Halles & the grands magasins
- The 1920s Left Bank — licensed
- A Room with a View — Santa Croce to Fiesole
- Dante's Florence & the Divine Comedy
- The Brownings at Casa Guidi
- The Light in the Piazza
- Renaissance Florence in fiction
- Death in Venice — San Marco & the Lido
- The Merchant of Venice — Rialto & the Ghetto
- Henry James — The Aspern Papers
- Brodsky's Watermark
- Donna Leon's Brunetti Venice
- Casanova — writer and character
- Genoa the Superb — palaces & the sea
- Dickens's Pictures from Italy
- Twain's The Innocents Abroad
- Montale's Ligurian landscape
- Caproni's poetic Genoa
- Nietzsche's Genoese years
- The Enchanted April, Portofino
The classics first, then the living writers
We're starting out with classics so we can quote and narrate freely — later, we'll invite publishers and contemporary authors to license official tours of their own books.
The imprint — books of literature and place
The publishing arm of Readable Cities: collectible editions of important and rediscovered works, beginning with the writers, cities and cultural networks of modernism and the Lost Generation. Each book is made as a designed object — not a reprint.
A designed object
Typography, paper, printing and binding chosen with care — books made to be kept, not merely read.
The city in the margins
Original maps, archival material and photographs, new introductions, annotations, chronologies and essays that illuminate the people and places around a work.
Beginning with the Lost Generation
Modernist works entering the public domain — alongside rediscovered and previously unpublished writing from the period.
Part of the platform
Select editions connect to original audio, literary walks and other experiences within the Readable Cities world.
Readable Cities brings literature into the physical city. Readable Cities Editions brings the city into the book.