Love Exploring New Cities? Free Audio Walking Tours All This Month

My favorite travel app, Detour, is disappearing, but they’re offering free tours of the world’s best cities until May 31.

Fontana delle Tartarughe (Turtle Fountain) flows in Piazza Mattei, just outside Rome’s Jewish quarter. For hundreds of years, Rome locked its Jewish people inside a squalid ghetto at night, releasing them at dawn to grind away at jobs that kept them impoverished. Due to lack of space, the ghetto built up, not out, and tall buildings blocked the sun while the Tiber river flooded the dank streets. The city finally tore down the walls in 1888, making Italy the last country in Western Europe to dismantle its ghetto — until the nazis brought them back. You’ll learn the whole story via Detour’s audio walking tour audio app.

It’s September 1943. You watch nazis patrol Rome’s Jewish Ghetto — your neighborhood — as friends obey orders to bring all their gold to the temple. You cry out that this is a trap, that the nazis won’t honor their promise to leave the Jews alone if they sacrifice 50 kilos of gold in 36 hours. And you will be proved right.

Using heart-racing music and storytelling, Detour’s audio guide “The Ghetto: Jewish Resistance during Nazi Occupation,” whisks you around Rome with narrator Il Moretto, “the most wanted Jew in the city.” An actor playing Il Moretto, who was a real person, takes you on a mission to find his missing mother while nazis hunt you. This is a time when standing on a street corner could land you in a death camp.

The Great Synagogue of Rome, where the Jewish people brought all their gold in Il Moretto’s true story.

Detour is the best audio guide I’ve listened to — and it’s being discontinued, at least in its current form. Bose purchased Detour and its future is unclear, but the great news is you have free access to their worldwide tours until May 31, 2018🚶Before this offer, I paid for the Rome package, which cost $25 for eight tours around Italy. Such great value and a fantastic option for solo travelers wanting to check out a city on their own time.

Features / Benefits

• Awesome music increases the drama of the walking tours.
• Engaging narrators have a personal connection to the stories they’re telling (Ken Burns narrates a Brooklyn tour, for example).
• Listen on your own or sync with friends.
• Go at your own pace. The tour takes an hour if you don’t lollygag — but I always do!
• GPS knows where you are, so the narration comes in and out depending on your location trigger. While the guide provides good audio directions, there’s also a map if you get lost (which I did a few times).
• Great value for money — private guide in your pocket!
• If you can’t travel, you can listen to the tours remotely.
• Free.

A few quirks

• It’s difficult to start the guide unless you’re in the exact GPS location for that part of the tour — sometimes you just want to stand on the shady side of the street.
• The tours drained my iPhone battery. Bring a back up charger.
• I wish they had a transcript of these audio guides. I often take notes on walking tours, but I’d love to be able to focus more on listening — and taking photos of cupcakes, etc — so a transcript referencing stats and anecdotes would be 🙌 Too bad this app is ceasing to exist in a few weeks, so this suggestion is a moot point.

For hundreds of years, Rome’s Jews were forced to live in a walled ghetto, which kept traditions, including culinary traditions, alive. Today, this neighborhood’s Jewish bakery Boccione is famous for its sour cherry and ricotta cakes. Find them at Via del Portico d’Ottavia, 1 (no sign on the door).

At one point on Rome’s nazi occupation tour, I ended up on Tiber Island, where people came 2,000 years ago to pray to the Greek God of Health. There’s still a 450-year-old hospital here, Fatebenefratelli, which was a centre for the nazi resistance during World War II. ✌️

As part of the tour you have to go inside the hospital, pass reception, and go upstairs. This feels so awkward, but narrator Il Moretto whispers in your ear to play it cool, you belong here. And you’re thinking, “I can’t go in here. I don’t belong here.” And then you put yourself in Il Moretto’s shoes.

He came here searching for his mother, while at the same time hiding from nazis who wanted to kill him. Suddenly, you feel insanely blessed and go inside the hospital, where you learn about the heroic doctors turned informants who communicated with Allied forces via radio in the basement. They also made up a disfiguring and contagious disease called Syndrome K to trick nazi soldiers into avoiding rooms that were really hiding healthy Jewish people.

Remains of a gate that walled in the Jewish Ghetto. The water fountain in the photo at the top of this page can be found just outside this gate post.

This audio walking tour gave me chills, educated me, and reminded me that no matter how bad the world gets, the pendulum swings back. RIP, Detour.

Until May 31, you can download the Detour app to explore 18 of the world’s best cities. Where do you wish you were touring around right now?

If you liked this article, you might enjoy the Postcard Academy travel podcast. Each week, expats and adventurers share their insider travel tips on the best food and cultural experiences in the most interesting places around the globe. I’m your host, Sarah Mikutel, an American who’s spent the last 7 years living in, and traveling around, Europe.