William Tell's legend is set around Lake Lucerne in central Switzerland: his home village Bürglen, the Rütli meadow, the marketplace of Altdorf where he shot the apple, the Tellsplatte where he leaped from the boat, and the Hohle Gasse near Küssnacht where Gessler was killed.
The route follows the story as the chronicler Tschudi and Schiller's play tell it. The legend is not documented history, and every stop is a traditional identification, but each place is real and can be visited.
Marie Curie's life runs from her birthplace on Freta Street in Warsaw to the Latin Quarter, the Radium Institute and the Panthéon in Paris. This route follows the places where Maria Skłodowska became Marie Curie.
It starts with the Flying University and a first laboratory in Warsaw, then the Sorbonne years, her 1895 wedding in Sceaux, the street where Pierre Curie died, the Musée Curie and her tomb in the Panthéon.
Fast & Furious was filmed in Los Angeles, Tokyo, Puerto Rico, Atlanta and Abu Dhabi, with Rio and the Dominican Republic as story settings. The first film used Echo Park and San Bernardino; later sequels travelled to Shibuya, Naranjito and the Etihad Towers.
The route follows the saga from Dom's Los Angeles streets through Tokyo, the Dominican Republic, Rio and Puerto Rico to Atlanta and Abu Dhabi. Several stops can be visited; some cities were stand-ins for other places.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is set in St. Petersburg, a town based on Hannibal, Missouri, where Mark Twain grew up: the Boyhood Home, Cardiff Hill and Mark Twain Cave.
Five stops follow the novel from the whitewashed fence to the cave where Tom and Becky Thatcher get lost, on the Mississippi's west bank. Jackson's Island, the pirates' hideaway, has no identified real model, so that stop marks the town and the river.
Departures (Okuribito), the 2008 film, was shot around Sakata, Kaminoyama and Tsuruoka in Yamagata, Japan. The story follows a cellist who becomes an encoffinment mortician in his hometown.
The route visits the Concerto café in Kaminoyama, the NK Agent office and Minato-za cinema in Sakata, the Tsuru-no-yu bathhouse in Tsuruoka and Amarume Station. Several buildings have moved or closed since filming.
The Ryukyu Kingdom ruled Okinawa from Shuri Castle in Naha, and its story can still be walked at Nakijin, Zakimi and Katsuren castles and the Tamaudun royal tombs.
The route follows the kingdom from the three-principality era and Shō Hashi's unification in 1429, through a rival lord's fall in 1458, to the royal tombs of 1501. Most of these castle sites are ruins or reconstructions.
Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona is set in Barcelona and Oviedo and shot there and in Avilés, from the rooftop of Casa Milà to the Hotel de la Reconquista and the Avilés lighthouse.
The route follows the summer of Vicky and Cristina in story order: Gaudí's chimneys, a spur-of-the-moment weekend in Asturias, Park Güell and the arched gate of Sant Pau. Each stop is a place where a scene from the film was set or shot.
The Italian Job (1969) is set in Turin, with the Great St Bernard Pass, Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin and the Nivolet Pass among its real filming places.
The story is a gold heist in traffic-jammed Turin. This route follows it from the Alps through London and Dublin to the Museo Egizio, Lingotto and the final bus on a mountain road. Some scenes were filmed far from where the story puts them.
Cast Away strands a FedEx troubleshooter on a Pacific island that is really Monuriki in Fiji, with a failed raft escape shot on Namotu. Its Memphis scenes draw on FedEx's real home base, and its opening and closing crossroads lie near Canadian, Texas.
The route follows Chuck Noland from a Moscow street off Red Square and the FedEx hub in Memphis to the two islands in Fiji, then back to the Texas Panhandle for the last scene. The island is never named in the film, so two stops are filming stand-ins.
The Fast and the Furious (2001) turned real Los Angeles places into Dom Toretto's world: Dodger Stadium, Bob's Market in Echo Park, the house on East Kensington Road and Neptune's Net in Malibu.
This route follows nine of those places in story order, from the opening test at Dodger Stadium to the final race on Terminal Island, with a detour to Race Wars at San Bernardino. Some are working shops, homes or airport ground; the film's streets are still the draw.
Gaidai's 1965 comedy was shot at Mosfilm and around Moscow, including the Moscow Power Engineering Institute and Vavilov Street, then in Odesa when autumn weather turned. Fans have since put Shurik and Lida in bronze in Ryazan and Krasnodar.
The film is three comic novellas about the student Shurik. The route follows where the film was made and the statues it left behind.
In the early 1900s a Russian army surveyor, Vladimir Arsenyev, mapped the wild Ussuri taiga with the help of Dersu Uzala, an indigenous hunter who read the forest better than any map. Arsenyev's memoir became a classic, and Akira Kurosawa turned it into an Oscar-winning film in 1975.
The route follows the story from Vladivostok to Lake Khanka and the Sikhote-Alin, then to Khabarovsk, Dersu's lost grave and the film's shooting base. Pins mark regions and towns, not exact campsites.
The Bourne Trilogy: Zurich's safe deposit box, the Paris car chase and Tangier's medina. A man with no memory is hunted by a CIA programme that wants him gone.
The route follows the three films in order, from Zurich and Paris through Mykonos, Berlin and Moscow to London and Tangier. Several cities were stand-ins for others, so the pins mark the story's places or honest approximations.
In May 1804 William Clark and about 30 others left a winter camp on the Mississippi and turned up the Missouri, the first stage of an expedition sent to cross the newly acquired western part of the country. Captains Meriwether Lewis and Clark kept journals, and many of their entries are quoted here in their own spelling.
The route follows them from Camp Dubois past a sergeant's grave, a tense standoff with the Teton Sioux, a winter at Fort Mandan, the Great Falls, the Continental Divide and the snowbound Lolo Trail to the Pacific, then home by way of Clark's signature on Pompeys Pillar. Where a camp is lost to the river or to time, the pin marks the nearest place you can visit.
Karl Bushby's Goliath Expedition is a walk from Punta Arenas, Chile, to his home town of Hull, England, via the Darién Gap, the Bering Strait, Siberia, Mongolia, the Caspian Sea and the English Channel. He started on 1 November 1998 and arrived in Hull on 2 November 2026.
The route follows twelve landmarks of the nearly 28-year journey, from the jungle of Panama to a frozen sea crossing in 2006 and two long swims. Positions are approximate except the start and the Dover beach, since the actual paths are not published stop by stop.
Follow in the footsteps of Jesus through the Holy Land: from the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth to the Jordan baptism site, Capernaum, the Sea of Galilee shore, Jericho, Gethsemane and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
The Gospels name many places but rarely fix a spot, so most stops here rest on tradition. Each is labelled as exact, approximate or speculative, with what archaeology can and cannot show.
Commissaire Dupin is set in Brittany: Jean-Luc Bannalec's detective, a Paris policeman transferred to Concarneau, solves murders in Pont-Aven, on the Glénan islands and in the Guérande salt marshes.
This route follows the first three novels, Bretonische Verhältnisse, Bretonische Brandung and Bretonisches Gold, then looks at how the TV series borrows other places such as Saint-Malo. Settings in the story are partly invented.
In Rachel Joyce's The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, a retired man walks from Kingsbridge in Devon to Berwick-upon-Tweed, passing Stroud, Cheltenham, Coventry and the Scottish border town of Kelso to reach a dying friend.
The route follows the walk stage by stage, from a post box in Devon to the hospice at the far end of England, and the reasons Harold gives, and withholds, for going. The novel names towns rather than streets, so every pin marks a town.
The Red and the Black is set in Franche-Comté: Julien Sorel grows up in the fictional town of Verrières, studies at the seminary in Besançon, and meets his end after a church shooting based on a real 1827 crime near Grenoble.
The route follows Julien from Verrières-de-Joux, the village that may have lent its name, through Besançon's citadel, seminary and cathedral, to Brangues and Place Grenette, where the real Antoine Berthet who inspired the novel was tried and executed.
Tintin's Brussels is the Marolles flea market where he buys the Unicorn, the Etterbeek street where Hergé was born, and the museums that keep his work: the Belgian Comic Strip Center, the Hergé Museum in Louvain-la-Neuve and the Moon rocket at Brussels Airport.
Hergé was born in Brussels, and the city shows up in his books and in the places that celebrate them. This route follows five real places from his birth in 1907 to the Tintin sights you can visit today.
The Unicorn flea-market scene is set in the Marolles; other stops are Tintin landmarks rather than story scenes.
The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto) is set in Recife during the 1977 carnival and was filmed on location in the city: Rua da Aurora, the Cinema São Luiz, the Capibaribe River and Parque 13 de Maio, plus the Federal University of Pernambuco campus. Director Kleber Mendonça Filho follows Armando, a former professor on the run in the Brazilian military dictatorship.
The route walks the film's carnival week, from the parade street to the shark, the cinema and the park where the Hairy Leg legend, based on real newspaper reports, takes hold.
Rabo de Peixe, the Netflix series known as Turn of the Tide, is set in a fishing village on São Miguel in the Azores, but it was shot in several places across the island: Porto Formoso, the Arnel lighthouse, Furnas and the ruined Monte Palace Hotel above Sete Cidades.
The story is loosely based on a real 2001 cocaine landing. The route follows the series from the village to its final scenes, with a note on what you can visit today.
Die Rosenheim-Cops is set in Rosenheim and the Chiemgau, but the town hall, Max-Josefs-Platz, the Chiemsee, Weyarn and Dietramszell are only part of where it was shot.
This route follows seven places where the crime series was set or filmed, from the police headquarters in Rosenheim's town hall to villas near Lake Starnberg. Several stops are marked by area, because the sources name the place but not the exact spot.
The Black Forest Clinic (Die Schwarzwaldklinik) was filmed at the Carlsbau in Glottertal, with the Brinkmann house in Grafenhausen and the town scenes in Schiltach.
The route follows the series' exteriors from the clinic building through Schluchsee, Triberg, Freiburg and Konstanz. Interiors were shot at Studio Hamburg, and the series stitches distant places into one fictional town.
