TOURinSTONES: a Free Mobile Application for Promoting Geological Heritage in the City of Torino (NW Italy)

The Piemonte mountains surrounding the city of Torino comprise a wide variety of rocks, characterized by a multitude of minerals, structures and colors. The Alps, because of their long and complex history, have produced a wide variety of ornamental stone used in the town, over the centuries, for both esthetic and structural reasons. TOURinSTONES is an application for mobile phones that allows geotourists to walk in the center of Torino, where the visitor can find Alpine rocks used in palaces and historical monuments as witnesses and tangible symbols of the city. The application consists of 26 historical sites of interest in each of which ornamental stones of historical and scientific interest can be observed in detail. The sites are grouped in four thematic itineraries through which the user can discover the city from the cultural and architectural point of view. By a numbered list of the stones used in all the described monuments, the user can access specific data on each rock including quarry location, petrographic description and utilization in Torino. The mobile application can be downloaded free from the App Store or Google Play respectively for Apple and Android devices.