Nellie Bly's 1889 record run began at a Hoboken pier, detoured to Jules Verne's house in Amiens, and crossed America by special train from San Francisco. The New York World reporter set out to turn Around the World in Eighty Days into fact and beat Phileas Fogg's record in 72 days, 6 hours and 11 minutes.
The route follows her book of 1890, stop by stop, with the dates from her own record. She went east by steamer and train, through the Suez Canal and the British ports of Asia.
In 1961 the Freedom Riders took two buses from Washington, D.C. through Rock Hill, Anniston, Birmingham and Montgomery to Jackson, Mississippi, to test the Supreme Court's ruling against segregated bus terminals. In Alabama a mob burned a bus while police looked away; hundreds more riders ended up in Mississippi's jails and Parchman Farm.
The route follows the rides through the places where it happened, several of them now museums and part of a National Monument.
In 218 BC the Carthaginian general Hannibal set out from Spain to attack Rome by the one route the Romans never expected: overland, across the Pyrenees, the Rhône and the Alps, with tens of thousands of soldiers, horses and 37 war elephants. Five months later he came down into the plain of the Po with a battered but unbeaten army, and within weeks had won his first two victories in Italy.
The route follows the march as told by the Greek historian Polybius, who wrote about seventy years later and walked the Alpine route himself. Nobody knows for certain where Hannibal crossed the Rhône or which pass he used, so several pins are marked speculative.
Before the Minotaur, there was the road. Theseus grew up in Troezen, never knowing his father; when he was old enough to lift a great stone and take the sword and sandals hidden beneath it, he set out to find him in Athens. The safe way was by sea. He chose the coast road round the Saronic Gulf instead, which was infested with bandits, and dealt with each one in the way they had treated travellers.
The route follows the six labours of that journey as Plutarch tells them in his Life of Theseus, written around AD 100 from much older tales. The places are real; the giants and robbers belong to myth, and several sites are traditional guesses.
The Oregon Trail follows real landmarks of the 2,170-mile trail: Independence, Missouri, Chimney Rock in Nebraska, Independence Rock in Wyoming and Oregon City at the end. Three student teachers in Minneapolis wrote it in 1971; the 1985 Apple II version, set in 1848, made buying oxen, fording rivers and dying of dysentery a classroom staple, and the series has sold more than 65 million copies.
The route follows the game's stops from Missouri to the Willamette Valley, with what stands at each place today.
After ten years at Troy, Odysseus sets sail for his island home of Ithaca and takes another ten to get there: blown off course, he meets a man-eating Cyclops, a witch who turns his crew into pigs, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis and a nymph who will not let him go, losing every ship and every companion on the way. Homer's Odyssey, composed around the late 8th century BC, has been read as a map for as long as it has been read.
Already in antiquity the poem's places were linked to real coasts, mostly around Sicily and southern Italy. Those identifications are traditions, not facts, and the ancient geographer Eratosthenes doubted them all — so most pins here are marked speculative.
Florence, 1476: young Ezio Auditore watches his father and brothers hanged on false charges, and spends the next quarter-century hunting the men responsible across Tuscany, Romagna and Venice, all the way to the Vatican. Ubisoft's 2009 game rebuilt Renaissance Italy for climbing and running across rooftops, and mixed its invented feud between Assassins and Templars with real people — the Medici and Pazzi, Leonardo da Vinci, Caterina Sforza and the Borgia pope.
The route visits the real buildings and towns of the game. The Auditore family and their villa are fictional; most of the events around them are invented or rearranged from history.
Into the Wild tells the true story of Christopher McCandless: he graduated from Emory University in Atlanta in 1990, paddled the Colorado River into Mexico, worked in Carthage, South Dakota, and in April 1992 walked onto the Stampede Trail outside Healy, Alaska. He died in an abandoned bus that August, aged 24. Jon Krakauer wrote the book in 1996; Sean Penn filmed it in 2007.
The route follows his documented trail. The Stampede Trail is dangerous, and this route is not an invitation to retrace the last part of it.
Alexander the Great's route runs from Troy and the Granicus in Turkey to Tyre, Alexandria and Persepolis, and on to the Jhelum in the Punjab. He crossed into Asia at 22, and eleven years later died in Babylon at 32, his empire stretching from Greece to India.
The route follows the campaign through its turning points, with Arrian's Anabasis, written four centuries later from earlier accounts, as the main guide. Several battlefields can only be placed approximately; their pins are marked as such.
Between 1947 and 1950 Sal Paradise, a young writer from New Jersey, crosses America again and again — hitchhiking, by bus and in borrowed cars — usually in pursuit of his wild, magnetic friend Dean Moriarty. Jack Kerouac typed the story on a continuous scroll of paper in three weeks in April 1951, and it was published in 1957. Sal is Kerouac, Dean is Neal Cassady, and most of the trips really happened.
The route picks out the places the novel names, from a rainy false start on the Hudson to Mexico City and back to a New York street corner. The novel gives towns and streets rather than addresses, so most pins mark areas, not doors.
