Founders’ Free Period — every narrated guide is free in the app until 31 August
Create your free account before 31 August and the complete audio library — every site, every language — stays yours forever. No catch, no purchase.
Audio guides along Sigeric’s road to Rome — Canterbury’s cathedral and the white cliffs behind it, the hospice at the Great St Bernard Pass, the Arch of Augustus at Aosta, the Certosa di Pavia. Four languages across four countries, and every word plays offline in the mountains.
The narration plays in the free app and nowhere else. Every script is free to read here.
Not a museum handset and not a scraped encyclopedia entry. 116 scripts written for the Via Francigena, in four languages, and built to work where there is no signal.
Every guide is an original script, researched site by site and written for the ear — never lifted off a webpage. Where you are standing, what to look for, and the one story worth carrying away with you.
Each language is written again from the same facts, in its own rhythm and its own references, with its own voice reading it. You get a guide that sounds like it was written by someone from your country.
Walk into range of a site and the guide begins on its own. No hunting through a menu with the sun on the screen, a pack on your back and gloves on your hands.
Download once on wifi and the whole library plays in flight mode — down in a gorge, out on a ridge, at the far end of the trail where nothing has a single bar of reception.
Three steps, and the last one is just walking.
Free on iPhone and Android. Scan the code above, or tap through — it works out which store you need.
Open Downloads, tap Audio Guides, choose your language. The whole library lands on the phone while you still have wifi.
Reach a site and the guide starts by itself — or press play whenever you like. The full script is on screen too, if you would rather read.
Each language is written again from the same research rather than run through a translator, and each has its own voice reading it. All 116 guides, all 29 sites, in every language below.
The app follows your phone’s language and falls back to English, so you never end up at a site with nothing to play.
Tap any pin to listen.
Every site on the Via Francigena that has a guide. Open any one to read the complete script — free, no account, in every language it was written in. Each carries a code that opens that guide in the app, which is the only place the audio plays.
Listen to a few guides and the road starts to tell one story. Three threads run the length of it.
It starts in Canterbury, at the spot where Archbishop Thomas Becket was murdered in 1170 — the shrine that drew medieval England onto the road. From here Archbishop Sigeric set out for Rome in 990, and his diary still names the stages that became the Via Francigena.
Through the Tuscan heart of the walk the skyline bristles with towers — San Gimignano's fifteen surviving giants, the perfect ring of walls at Monteriggioni, and Siena, where the shell-shaped Piazza del Campo opens at the foot of the road.
The last stretch into Lazio is thick with legend: the Eucharistic miracle of Bolsena that gave the Church the feast of Corpus Christi, the popes who ruled from the palace at Viterbo, and the Etruscan amphitheatre carved straight from the rock at Sutri.
The first words you hear when you reach Great St Bernard Pass & Hospice.
You are standing at two thousand four hundred and sixty-nine metres, on the roof of the entire road to Rome. This is the Great St Bernard Pass: a stark saddle of bare rock and late-lying snow, a small cold lake, a huddle of tall stone buildings, and the statue of Saint Bernard watching the old paved road drop away towards Italy. Behind you lies Switzerland. Ahead, at long last, is Italy. And beside you stands a…The Great St Bernard Pass: The Roof of the Pilgrim Road · read the whole guide →
The app is free, and until 31 August 2026 every one of the 116 narrated guides is free inside it. Open a free account before 1 September and the complete library stays yours permanently. Separately and always: the full written script of every guide is published free on this website, in every language it exists in.
Yes, completely. Download them over wifi before you set off and they play in flight mode — the audio, the script and the maps. That is the point: the places these guides describe are mostly where the signal is not.
Four: English, Deutsch, Italiano and Nederlands. Each one is written again from the same research rather than machine-translated, and each has its own voice reading it. All 29 sites are available in every one of them.
No. The app starts a guide automatically when you walk into range, which is how most people use them, but you can play any guide any time — on the plane, over breakfast, or at home while you plan.
Yes. Every script on this page is published in full and free to read, with no account and no app. The narration itself lives only in the app.
We do. Each guide is researched for its own site and written to a fixed shape — where you are standing, what to look for, the one human story worth carrying away — then checked against the archaeology and the local record. That is 116 original scripts for the Via Francigena alone.
They cover the great set pieces along it, from Canterbury through France and over the Alps into Italy. The catalogue below lists every site that has a guide, and which stage it sits on, so you can see exactly what is waiting on the section you are walking.
Every guide on this page is narrated in the free Via Francigena app, and only there. This website is where you read and plan; the app is what you walk with.
Tell us your dates, difficulty, and what you need. We'll match tours, guides, accommodation, and transfers along the stages with audio guides.
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