Aby Warburg's Florence

The app Aby Warburg’s Florence (available on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store) invites the user to follow three itineraries, exploring unexpected perspectives on Florence using smartphone GPS.

It accompanies the exhibition Rooms with a View. Aby Warburg, Florence and the Laboratory of Images (Florence, Gallerie degli Uffizi, 19 September – 10 December 2023), organized by the Gallerie degli Uffizi and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut in cooperation with the Warburg Institute, London.

Encouraging a new experience of space, Aby Warburg’s Florence expands the exhibition Rooms with a View to the entire city, presenting Florence as an atlas or a map of itself. A selection of Florentine voices introduces the user to the multiple temporalities of the city: Aby Warburg’s Florence is both the Renaissance city he studied and the city of his own time, which he lived in and visited.

The user will meet more than twenty witnesses of their eras, captured in a snapshot of their lives, who will tell you about an aspect, an episode or a detail of 25 selected places along three itineraries.

In each of the locations along the itineraries, the user is invited to find a detail related to the panels of Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas or to objects displayed in the exhibition. The user can retrace Warburg’s visual constellations or create new ones, discovering unexpected details and meanings.

The app project was realized by the Digital Humanities Lab of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut.