In 1990, my wife and I went to Florence armed with a paperback called Florence Walks, and for the better part of a week I turned into the world's least qualified audiobook narrator.
The book itself was terrific — one of those rare guides that braids together the history, the art, the architecture, and the gossip of a place without ever feeling like homework. It knew which alley to duck into, which fresco had a scandal behind it, which family had bribed which pope. Reading it felt like being handed the good stuff.
The trouble was the delivery mechanism, which was me. Somewhere around the Ponte Vecchio it became clear that "delivery mechanism" is a generous way of describing a man walking slightly backward, squinting at small print, reading aloud to his wife while trying not to step in front of a Vespa. It worked, more or less. It was even, in its way, a lovely week. But I remember thinking, with the mild irritation of someone who's just realized he's doing a job badly: there has to be a better way to do this.
There wasn't, not yet. The technology that would eventually let a guidebook actually talk — and, more to the point, listen — was still years off. So I filed the idea away and kept traveling, the way you do with an itch you can't quite reach.
The tours I loved, and their one fatal flaw
I've taken more walking tours than I can count, and I'll keep taking them — a good guide is one of travel's genuine pleasures. But "good" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. You don't find out whether you've got a good guide or a dud until the tour has already started, at which point you're committed, the way you're committed to a haircut the moment the first cut goes in. You wait for the stragglers. You stand through the question you already know the answer to, asked by the man in the sun hat. You pay a real amount of money for what is, essentially, a bet on one stranger's Tuesday.
At one point I tried to solve this the hard way, by adapting museum-style audio guide devices for use in cities. The idea seemed obvious enough: think of a whole city as an open-air museum, every street and doorway loaded with stories nobody's telling you. The idea was sound. The logistics were not. Somebody has to hand out the devices, get them back, keep them charged, replace the ones left on a train to Pisa. It's a real business. It is not, I discovered, a good one — and certainly not one I was equipped to run.
Thirty years is a long time to wait for the pieces to show up
What I actually wanted was simple to describe and, until recently, impossible to build: a guide that knew as much as that Florence paperback, delivered it as naturally as a good human guide would, and — this was the part no book or device could ever manage — answered you when you asked it something.
That's Explorio. It took the better part of thirty years for the technology to catch up to a week in Florence with my nose in a paperback, but here we are. I no longer have to read aloud to my wife while dodging Vespas, which she, for one, considers real progress.
If you've ever stood in front of something beautiful with more questions than answers and no one around to ask, that's exactly who we built this for.