Frédéric Chopin was born in Żelazowa Wola near Warsaw, lived in Warsaw until 1830, wintered on Mallorca, composed in Nohant and died in Paris; his body lies in Père Lachaise, his heart in Warsaw's Holy Cross Church.
This route follows the composer's life from his birthplace and the Warsaw home he left in 1830 to Valldemossa, Nohant, his last Paris apartment on Place Vendôme and the two resting places that split him between France and Poland.
In 1989 communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe came apart in a few months — through round-table talks in Poland, a picnic on the Hungarian border, candlelit marches in Leipzig, a muddled press conference in Berlin, students in Prague and a bloody uprising in Romania. Each country had its own causes, but every crack made the next one easier.
The route visits the exact places where it happened, most of them marked today by a memorial, a museum or a plaque: the shipyard gate where Solidarity was born, the palace of the Round Table, the old border road near Sopron, the church in Leipzig, the bridge at Bornholmer Straße, a street corner in Prague, a pastor's flat in Timișoara and the balcony in Bucharest.
