”Italy is a gift from the Gods. To love, to respect, to honour” is what Russell Crowe wrote in a tweet, in love – like so many celebrities but also like so many tourists – with Rome and Italy!
Although tour operators complain that they have not sold out, this year, there has been a boom in tourists visiting Italy. After all, the Bel Paese is so rich in art, history and nature that an encyclopaedia could be written… Or, more in keeping with the times, an app could be created to tell about such beauty!
A navigator – storyteller
This is what Loquis, a completely free Made in Italy app for iOS, Android and the web, does. Thanks to a series of geolocalised contents, it clearly and quickly tells the history, anecdotes, and curiosities of the cultural heritage and landscape that one encounters on foot, by tram, car, train… In short, it is a very special kind of navigator, which does not give directions but tells you about the places you visit. ‘Let the world talk’ is Loquis’ motto, and it is amazing to discover how many things the places we pass through – even in our everyday lives – have to say!
A large community
Loquis is a fully interactive tool. Anyone can contribute to the project by registering and uploading new content, which is then organized by channel, area of interest, and, above all, geographical location, and it is ready to be enjoyed. Thanks to the community of more than 300,000 users, new audio clips about anecdotes, trivia and stories are uploaded to Loquis every day in addition to the existing podcasts, and each user can create their own personalised channel.
Success in figures
The Loquis project is 100% Made in Italy. Its Founder and CEO is Bruno Pellegrini, from Rome, born in 1972, a pioneer of video crowdsourcing in Italy. It was his idea to design the first Travel Podcasting Platform in 2018, which now has two hundred thousand geo-podcasts listenable in five languages, seventy thousand of which are dedicated to Italy. What’s more, three hundred channels have been created ad hoc, such as the one developed together with Trenitalia S.p.A. for people travelling on regional Intercity trains or the podcasts for ATAC dedicated to the various tram lines in Rome and narrated by Francesco Pannofino.
“I had the idea while driving on the motorway. I would have liked someone to tell me the story of the villages around me,” Pellegrini explains in an interview with Sky.
“So I started to think of an app that would organise all the information, stories, anecdotes that were scattered, disaggregated in paper and ‘human’ guides,
offering them as audio. This is how Loquis came about, a platform linked to places that explains, for example, what Milan was like fifty years ago or what to do in Rome with children, or helps you discover the beauty of Sicily.”
Loquis’ supporters
A large group of private investors and top managers of large Italian and non-Italian companies supports Loquis, including Feltrinelli Bookstores, Digital Magics, Bob Kunze-Concewitz, Campari Group, Vincenzo Bracciale, Ferrero, Giuseppe Morici, Bolton Group, Ismail Gazarin, Eidosmedia, Cristiano Arca, Prink Italia, Massimo Armanini, Crescita Holding, Rothschild, Deutsche Bank and RMC.
Easy and intuitive, Loquis aims to become a worldwide model and expand across Europe and the United States in the near future.
Congratulations to those who share, tell and enhance Italy in the world!
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