Beethoven's life runs from Bonn, where he was born in 1770, to Vienna, where he lived from 1792, wrote the Eroica and the Fifth Symphony, and is buried in the Zentralfriedhof.
He was born in a small house on Bonngasse and moved to Vienna at 21. There he faced growing deafness, which he wrote about in the Heiligenstadt Testament in 1802, and composed in the Pasqualati House and the Theater an der Wien.
This route follows the composer from his Bonn birthplace through the Vienna addresses where his symphonies and Fidelio were written and first heard, to his grave and the 1845 Bonn monument.
Bonnie and Clyde's two-year run took them from Eastham prison farm in Texas through a Joplin shootout, the Red Crown Tourist Court in Missouri and Dexfield Park in Iowa, to a roadside ambush near Gibsland, Louisiana.
This route follows the real trail in order, from Clyde Barrow's prison years to the morning of 23 May 1934 and his burial in Dallas. Some spots are only approximately known, and each says so.
Prince Charles Edward Stuart's 1745 rising began on the beach of Eriskay, raised its standard at Glenfinnan, won at Prestonpans and ended on Culloden Moor, after which the prince fled through Skye and Raasay.
The route follows the campaign from landing to flight in six stops across Scotland's west coast, the East Lothian coast, the area near Inverness and the islands of Skye and Raasay. Positions for the Skye crossing and for the battlefields are approximate, so check local signage before you go.
Little Women is set in a Massachusetts town loosely based on Concord, and Louisa May Alcott wrote it at Orchard House, the Alcott family home that is now a museum. Follow the March sisters from Concord to Washington, Nice and Lake Geneva.
The route visits Orchard House and The Wayside, where the Alcott family lived and acted out scenes later used in the book, then follows the story abroad: a Washington hospital, the Promenade des Anglais in Nice and Chillon on Lake Geneva. The Concord stops are the real houses behind the March family's home.
The Wolverine (2013) is set in Tokyo and Nagasaki, but it was filmed at Zojo-ji Temple, Nakagin Capsule Tower, Fukuyama Station and the port of Tomonoura, plus a reserve near Sydney standing in for 1945.
The route follows Logan from a prisoner-of-war camp in August 1945 to Yashida's funeral in Tokyo, a bullet-train fight and a hideout in a love hotel, ending in the fishing port of Tomonoura. Several scenes were shot in Australia, and the Nakagin tower no longer stands.
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.
On 26 February 1815 Napoleon slipped away from Elba with some 1,000 men. Within a month he was back in the Tuileries, and by mid-July he had surrendered to the Royal Navy.
The route follows him stop by stop: his villa on Elba, the landing at Golfe-Juan, the meeting at Laffrey and the entry into Grenoble on the Route Napoléon, the Tuileries, the farms of Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte at Waterloo, then Malmaison and Île d'Aix, where his journey ended. The pins at Golfe-Juan and Grenoble mark the towns, not exact spots.
Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag sets its pirate Caribbean in Havana, Nassau, Kingston and Port Royal. Edward Kenway steals a dead Assassin's name, takes the Jackdaw, builds a brotherhood in Nassau, loses his friends and chases the Observatory, a device that can watch anyone on earth.
Black Flag sets all of it in real ports — Havana, Nassau, Kingston, Port Royal — and then leaves the Caribbean for the Maya ruins of Tulum, an island in the Gulf of Guinea and a final scene in London. The route follows Edward from the harbour where Torres's plot starts, through the pirate republic and the governor who ends it, to the Kingston house where Mary Read drops the disguise, the jail at Port Royal, Príncipe, where the Sage is waiting, and Covent Garden. Most stops mark a real landmark in the town the game rebuilds.
Fallout: New Vegas rebuilds the real Mojave: Goodsprings, Primm, Nipton, Searchlight, Boulder City and Hoover Dam are all on its map. In 2281 a courier carrying a platinum poker chip is shot and left in a shallow grave, survives and hunts the man who did it, into a war for the desert between the New California Republic, Caesar's Legion and Mr. House.
The designers built the map from US Geological Survey data and photographs of the real desert, so the game's road south from Goodsprings and back up to Las Vegas runs through real towns. The route follows that road. The towns' massacres, radiation and battles are fiction; their saloons, roller coasters and dam are not.
