Wayfaring Walking Tours

If you know the places in a city that you want to visit, but don’t know the most efficient route to use to see them all without backtracking on your path or going out of your way, Wayfaring.com might be able to help you out. From Italofile:

Here’s an easy way to use Google Maps to create your own interactive driving routes or walking tours. The website Wayfaring.com has done all the coding for you. All you have to do is locate your points on a map, give them descriptions, and you’re done. You can also connect waypoints to create routes.

The good news is it’s easy to use. The bad news is that it’s a new service and it doesn’t have many walking/driving tours of Italy loaded yet. Once you’ve moved the map on the “Search” page over to Italy, type something like “Rome” into the search box and you’ll see the tours that people have entered. Type whatever you want into that box, and so long as you’re looking at the country in the map on the left, you’ll get results if people have posted maps.

I can see Wayfaring eventually being fun for tourists to use (when it’s really full of great walking tours, etc.), to get an idea of what other people think are worthwhile sights to visit; and also a cool way for tour guides or anyone who’s knowledgeable about a city to share their favorite walks through it. And since the service is intended to be worldwide, you needn’t stop with Italy, either. Play around with it and have fun – add a few maps of places you know, and maybe karma will come back around and someone else will add a few Italy maps in return!