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, for their long and complex history, offer a wide variety of ornamental stone used in the town, over the centuries, for both aesthetic and structural reasons. TourinStone is an application for the mobile phone that allows geotourists to walk in the center of Torino, where the visitor can be find Alpine rocks used in palaces and historical monuments as witness and tangible symbols of the city. The application consists of twenty-six 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 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.
Response to Reviewers:We have accepted the suggestions advanced by both referees. In particular we have valued the language corrections of Ref.#1 and we have checked the manuscript to correct mistakes
This paper presents an attempt at the evaluation of the Alpine geoheritage of the Susa Valley (Piemonte region, NW Italy). The area is included in the project for the creation of the 'Cottian Alps Geopark', whose application to the European Geoparks Network is in progress. The Susa valley is a unique and great geological section showing all the structures and rocks involved in Alpine orogenesis. Moreover, it shows outstanding examples of interactions between human activities and processes of the physical environment. We considered these cultural landscapes as a heritage worthy to be known by people and to be exploited by geotourism activities. Therefore, we investigated the local geodiversity, assessed the geoheritage and identified the geosites characterised by a high potential for the enhancement of public understanding of geoscience and for recreational activities. In this paper, we describe the actions and methodologies carried on for creating geo-itineraries and for improving tourism activities and scientific knowledge. In particular, we focus attention on the Franks trail, a 60-km-long route crossing the Geopark territory, which follows the path blazed by Charlemagne in 773 AD as he attempted to avoid the Longobard army. The trail runs through many sites which tell about natural and cultural heritage. Our evaluation project makes the trail suitable as a 'cultural extension' of the 'Via GeoAlpina', an international project that aims to show the wonders of alpine geology and geomorphology.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.