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Get Ready to Meet our Rome Coloring Book
Back in July, we spent a couple of weeks in Rome with Context Travel. Context, if you’re not familiar with them, has a pretty cool business: they offer ‘walking seminars’ in 38 cities around the world. Their tour guides (‘docents’ in Context-speak) are all Ph.D. or Masters-educated experts in their field, leading small group tours of (typically) pretty educated people around a city while sharing a discussion around a particular theme or set of themes: history, politics, architecture, engineering, food…wherever the discussion leads you, really.
In Rome, we experienced Context’s way of doing things first-hand, and came out totally sold on their tours. We went to the Vatican Museums and saw the Sistine Chapel with an art critic/historian leading our discovery. We visited Ancient Rome’s port city of Ostia Antia with an archaeologist. We toured the historical centre with a restoration architect. And we climbed beneath some of Rome’s most interesting churches with a medievalist. No big deal, right?
It was an eye-opening experience for both of us, and we’ll certainly try to do many, many more tours with Context into the future.
What we didn’t tell you back in July, however, was the OTHER reason we were in Rome with Context Travel. We were making a coloring book with them…and it’s almost done.
Travel Between the Lines Coloring Rome…Inspired By Context Travel
We actually met the Context team at a conference in Minneapolis back in May, and when they told us what they do, and we told them what we do, we all got really excited and decided to make a coloring book together.
From Paul Bennett, one of Context’s co-founders:
We were thrilled when Katie and Geoff approached us with the idea of sponsoring an adult coloring book. Why? Well, for one, I love the meditative, reflective aspect of coloring books. There’s a feeling of studied release you experience when you simply pick up a pencil and start coloring in one of their streetscapes. In fact, the experience (for me) is very similar to that of walking Rome’s quiet streets at dusk or dawn. The details are clear, vibrant, and pop out at you.
Geoff and Katie’s project is a natural fit with our “intellectually curious” approach to travel. On some level we try to attain the same thing on our expert-led walking tours of Rome and 37 other cities worldwide: a sense of focus and awareness, an attention to detail, and a deep engagement with place. And, so we felt like it made great sense to sponsor their trip to Rome, fill it with Context docent-led walking tours, and try to make Rome come alive in a way that would inform their photography and eventually make it onto the page.
And, of course, we were thrilled to experience Rome with Context, and try something new with a company that, in our opinion, offers a fantastic experience.
Created from Real Life
As with our first adult coloring book, and our Mexico adult coloring book, the Rome book focuses on showing a real time and place in Rome. Every coloring page is a hand-tracing of a photo either Geoff or I took while in Rome.
Take a look:
On Sale Soon
We’re just in the process of putting the final touches on the book. All the art is done. We have cover and interior proofs, and are at the stage where we’re agonizing over which font looks most “Rome.”
Barring any disasters, we expect to have it on sale within the next week to 10 days. Just in time for Christmas (cough, cough…hint, hint). As always, you’ll be able to purchase it on Amazon, along with our other 2 books.
While we don’t have a cover to show you yet, we can show you all 38 pages of the interior artwork. Click on the photo below, and it will open up as a gallery you can click through.
See more about the book here
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Thank You, Thank You, Thank You!
Every time we get to this stage in book production, we’re always: A) Exhausted. Coloring is a lot of work :) B) Really excited to see what you think, and C) Thankful for everyone who made it possible.
We’ve been getting more and more emails and messages from readers all over the world lately, and we love it when we hear from you. Please, keep it coming. We know that this crazy blog/colouring book business doesn’t exist without you.
In this case, we’re also hugely thankful to the team at Context: Paul, co-founder Lani, and Brian from Marketing for getting so excited about this and being willing to give it a try, and Context’s world-class team in Rome: Regional Manager Martina, and Context docents Patrizia Sfligiotti, Liz Brewster, Roberta Bernabei and Philip Ditchfield. We learned so much from you all, and hope we’ve managed to capture even a fraction of your collective knowledge about what is truly one of the greatest cities on earth!
Happy Friday, everyone! More on Coloring Rome when it hits the shelves!