Florence
Trim is a free self-guided walking game for Florence. You follow a route through one of the city's historic quarters, and at each stop you are asked to find a specific detail on a wall, a door or a stone. When you find it, the story behind it unlocks.
There are 4 routes in Florence, one for each historic quarter: San Giovanni, Santa Maria Novella, Santa Croce and Santo Spirito, 29 stops in total. Each route takes between 30 and 45 minutes, which means one fits between two museum bookings or into an evening after dinner.
It runs in your phone's browser, so there is no app to download. It is free, and you create an account before you start. Available in English and five other languages.
The same three steps repeat at every stop on the route.
There is no guide, no group and no fixed departure time. You start when you feel like it and stop whenever you want.
Trim is not a replacement for the Uffizi, the Accademia or climbing the Duomo. Book those separately, they are worth it.
Trim is for the hours in between, which is usually the part of a Florence trip nobody plans. The morning before your museum slot. The afternoon when everything is booked out. The evening walk after dinner when the streets are finally quiet. Those are the hours most visitors spend queuing or scrolling, and they are the hours the city is most worth looking at closely.
The Duomo and Baptistery quarter, the exact centre of the city. Start here if it is your first day.
The area around the main train station and its basilica. The longest of the four, and a good first stop if you have just arrived by train.
The basilica where Michelangelo and Galileo are buried, and the side streets around it that most visitors never turn into.
The Oltrarno, across the river from the crowds. Workshops, artisans, and the Florence that Florentines actually live in.
Alongside the routes there is a game called Icebreaker, and it is the one part of Trim you cannot finish on your own. To complete it you have to find a local resident and ask them for help answering two questions about Florentine traditions, dialect and local sayings.
The answers are deliberately not in the app. They are in the head of somebody who lives here. The point is to give a visitor a real reason to start a conversation with a Florentine, which is the one thing a guided tour almost never produces.
Yes, from about age 8. The content is the same for everybody, there is no simplified children's version.
What makes it work for families is the format. Children are looking for something rather than being told to stand still and listen, and the 30 to 45 minute length sits inside a child's attention span instead of testing it. It also leaves most of the day free for everything else.
Yes. There is a play from home mode that lets you explore Florence and its routes before you arrive. It is useful for seeing how the game works, and for landing in the city already knowing which quarter you want to start with.
Yes, completely. You create an account before you start playing.
No. Trim runs in your phone's browser and works straight away. That was a deliberate choice: if you are in Florence for three days, you should not have to install something and then delete it.
No. You need a working data connection for the whole route, so bring a local SIM, an eSIM or a roaming plan.
Six: English, Italian, French, German, Spanish and Swedish.
One route takes 30 to 45 minutes. San Giovanni covers the streets around the Duomo, so you are walking through the area you were going to see anyway, just noticing more of it.
San Giovanni if it is your first day and you are staying central. Santo Spirito if you have already seen the main sights and want the side of the river where locals live.
Opens in your browser, choose a route, and go. Free, nothing to install.
Open Trim