Creating “silent maps” for educational purposes

Dear community,

I've been spinning some ideas about programmatically creating "silent" (blank?) maps for studying geography. Based on the bounding box of the desired item (like a city or street, could be any POI basically), I'd like to automagically render a custom tile with the appropriate zoom level and no street/city names indicated.

Based on my current research, I believe I should go with maperitive, however I was hoping the community would provide some feedback or suggestions regarding a specific tool that might help me or even point me into the direction of a similar project.

Thanks in advance