Venıce

La Serenissima, the ancient Venetians called their republic: the Most Serene. It's a magnificent epithet for a city that invented modern banking, the telescope, and quarantine, and which still baffles visitors who arrive with a full day and leave somehow having done exactly what everyone else did.

The problem isn't the labyrinth. Venice's calli have always disoriented visitors, but what no map can capture is what fills the spaces between landmarks: the bacari where a glass of wine costs a euro and no one is photographing it, the Castello backstreets where washing lines cross above the campi.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours work at both distances. Walk the Doge's Palace and ride the Grand Canal vaporetto with the depth they deserve, then follow a National Geographic journalist who has lived in Venice since 1994 through Castello's back streets, or trace Tintoretto's footsteps from the Jewish Ghetto northward. Plug in your earbuds and find out why they called it Serenissima.