Cronoscopio: Italy Then & Now
Italian landscapes, then & now
Free · In‑App Purchases · Designed for iPad. Not verified for macOS.
It doesn't tell you what you're looking at. It tells you what is no longer there.
Cronoscopio is about Italy only: it sets today's Italian landscape beside yesterday's. From the ground, on a photo of the place — or on what you frame with the camera — it draws how far the glacier reached, where the shoreline ran, where the landslide came down. From above, it puts aerial photos from two eras side by side with a slider you drag: 1954 against today, the forest before and after the storm, the city growing.
FROM THE GROUND
• Views of the places chosen and lined up by us, to look at even from home.
• Your photos: if you took it at one of Cronoscopio's places, the app lines it up with the real mountains and draws on it how things used to be.
• Live: frame the ridges against the sky and the lines of the past appear on the landscape, locked to the outline of the mountains.
FROM ABOVE
• Public aerial photos of all of Italy from 1988 to 2012, beside today's map; where the Regions publish them, also 1954 and recent years.
• Historical maps dated from their content, back to the nineteenth-century cadastre.
• At the places: glacier outlines year by year, shorelines, dunes, the sea expected in 2100, the Regions' land use.
THIRTY PLACES, AND WHY THEY'RE THERE
Glaciers — the Marmolada, the Forni, the Lys, the Miage, the Adamello. Coasts — Comacchio, the Po Delta, the Poetto, the Tiber mouth, the Scala dei Turchi. Lakes and rivers — the bell tower of Curon in Lago di Resia, the Vajont. Events — the Amatrice earthquake, the Faenza flood, the Morandi bridge, the Carezza forest flattened by storm Vaia. Each place says why it's there and what to look for. These are the first thirty: the list will grow over time.
WITH THE SOURCES IN VIEW
Everything comes from Italian public data — ministries, Regions, provinces, research institutes — and every screen says where it comes from, with its licence, and what is our own estimate. The snapshots you save carry the source written into them. Place names stay in Italian, as on the road signs.
OFFLINE, NO ACCOUNT
Download a place before you set off and it works even where there's no signal. No account, no advertising, no tracking: your location is used on the phone and never sent.
FREE AND FULL VERSION
Free: the comparison of aerial photos anywhere in Italy, land use, the big screen on a computer, and six selected places with three years each; the place you are in, however, you see in full. The full version, a one-time purchase, opens all the places, all the years, the historical maps and the download of any place, and includes the new places and new maps of Italy we will add. No subscription.
In English and Italian.
Ratings & Reviews
- This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
When you open the app, it tells you about new places and about the places on your phone that have been updated, with a button to update them.
The guide's screenshots are now in English too.
Towns in Sardinia now open the map on the town itself, not in the middle of the countryside (it was a bug).
The developer, Giorgio Di Falco, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- Giorgio Di Falco
- Size
- 42.7 MB
- Category
- Travel
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 15.0 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 15.0 or later. - iPad
Requires iPadOS 15.0 or later. - iPod touch
Requires iOS 15.0 or later. - Mac
Requires macOS 12.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later. - Apple Vision
Requires visionOS 1.0 or later.
- iPhone
- Languages
- English and Italian
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- Copyright
- © 2026 Giorgio Di Falco