Rembrandt lived in Amsterdam from 1631 to his death in 1669, and his story runs from the Rembrandt House Museum and the Rijksmuseum's Night Watch to the Oude Kerk, Rozengracht, Westerkerk and Rembrandtplein.
The route follows the painter from the Jodenbreestraat house he bought in 1639, through his wife Saskia's burial, bankruptcy and the move to the Jordaan, to his rented grave in 1669. Several stops can still be visited today.
Anne Frank wrote her diary in the Secret Annex at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam, within sight of the Westerkerk tower. The route starts at the family's flat on the Merwedeplein, where she got the diary on her thirteenth birthday in 1942.
It follows the family from the Annex through the arrest of 4 August 1944 to Westerbork, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen, where Anne died in early 1945.
In January 1981 a CIA team led by Russell Adler hunts Perseus, a Soviet spy Adler believed dead. The trail runs from an Amsterdam bar and a Vietnam flashback to East Berlin, the KGB's Lubyanka and a Cuban firefight, before reaching the Solovetsky Islands. The route follows the campaign's real places in mission order and keeps the game's story apart from the real history of each place. A final stop marks the alternate ending at Duga.
The Mayflower's 1620 voyage runs from Scrooby in Nottinghamshire and Leiden in the Netherlands through Southampton, Dartmouth and Plymouth, England, to Provincetown and Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts.
The Pilgrims were English Separatists who left home for the Netherlands, then sailed for America in two ships. One, the Speedwell, kept leaking, so they crowded onto the Mayflower alone and finally sailed from Plymouth in September 1620, bound for Virginia.
This route follows them stop by stop, from the manor where their church met to the rock tradition names as their landing place. Plymouth Rock is a tradition, not a documented spot, and the stop says so.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) and Modern Warfare II (2022) are set in real cities such as London, Saint Petersburg, Amsterdam and Chicago, plus Moldova and Georgia, alongside invented countries.
The route follows the campaigns in story order: the attack on Piccadilly Circus and the Camden Town raid, the trail through Saint Petersburg, Baurci and Borjomi, then the courier chase in Amsterdam and the finale in Chicago. Invented countries are left off the map, and the pins mark each real city or town, not a mission's exact setting.
When Harry Met Sally... begins with a drive out of the University of Chicago and settles into Manhattan, from the Washington Square Arch and Central Park to Katz's Delicatessen, where Sally makes her famous point.
The route follows the pair from graduation in 1977 to a New Year's Eve declaration at the Puck Building, with seven stops: Cobb Gate, the Washington Square Arch, the Loeb Boathouse, the Temple of Dendur, Katz's, Cafe Luxembourg and the Puck Building. Stops follow the film's scene order, not a single journey.
A dumped teenager from Ohio crosses Europe to find his German pen pal: London, Paris, Amsterdam, Bratislava, Berlin and finally the Vatican. The joke is that nearly all of it was shot in one city, Prague, apart from a single beach scene in Rostock.
Each stop pairs the story city with the real place that played it, so you can see where the fiction and the film set part ways. Story cities are approximate; the Prague filming spots are exact.
In March 1697 a great Russian embassy left Moscow for Europe, and the tsar went with it incognito as "Peter Mikhailov", though at 2.03 metres he was one of the tallest men around. He worked in shipyards, studied gunnery and tried to broaden the Holy League against the Ottoman Empire.
The route follows the journey stop by stop: Riga and Königsberg, the Dutch shipyards, London and Deptford, then Vienna and the meeting with Augustus II at Rava-Ruska. Dates follow each source: the Dutch article uses the Gregorian calendar, the English and Russian sources the Old Style, so the labels say which.
Studio Ghibli's worlds feel lived-in because Miyazaki went to look at real places: a Welsh mining museum for the village in Castle in the Sky, Visby for the town of Kiki's Delivery Service, the harbour of Tomonoura before Ponyo. Other links are only rumoured, and he has denied at least one, the town of Jiufen in Taiwan for Spirited Away.
This route follows eight films in release order, from 1986 to 2008, and pairs each with the real place reported as its inspiration. Only some of these identifications come from Miyazaki himself, so every stop says whose claim it is, and none of them is a filming location.
Assassin's Creed III crosses the American Revolution from London's Covent Garden opera house to Boston's Old State House, Bunker Hill and the Battery in Manhattan. In 1754 the Templar Haytham Kenway carries a stolen key to the colonies; his son Connor becomes the Assassin who hunts him through the war.
Assassin's Creed III builds its America from real maps, and almost every stop can still be walked: the opera house in Covent Garden, the Old State House and Boston Harbor, the green at Lexington and the bridge at Concord, the Bunker Hill battlefield, the Valley Forge encampment, the Monmouth battlefield, and the Battery at the foot of Manhattan, where the war ends.
