Ridley Scott's 2005 epic follows Balian, a French blacksmith turned Baron of Ibelin, from his village to Messina, Jerusalem, Kerak, the desert defeat at Hattin and the siege that ends the film. Every stop pairs a scene with the place where it was shot, or with the real place the scene stands for.
The film was made in Spain and Morocco, not the Holy Land, so the route moves between sets and history. Where the film departs from the record, the stop says so: the historical Balian was a prominent lord of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, not a French artisan.
Nioh plays out its dark-fantasy 1600 on real ground: the Tower of London, Kyoto, Sekigahara and Osaka Castle. William Adams, a blond outsider, escapes England and becomes Ieyasu's ally against demons and the alchemist Edward Kelley in Japan's civil wars.
The route follows the main campaign and its last two expansions: the Tower of London, Kyoto, Sekigahara, then the Sanada-maru, Tennōji and Osaka Castle. The game is fantasy, so the map shows where its history happened, not where it was filmed or modelled.
Team Ninja's open-world samurai game drops a masterless Blade Twin into the last years of the shogunate. Between 1858 and 1868 the story runs from Yokohama's foreign quarter through the killing of a Chief Minister to Kyoto's Shinsengumi and a plot to burn Edo.
This route follows the game's main story through seven places, from the port to the capital, pairing each scene with the real site that history ties to it. Where the game names only a district, the pin marks the nearest well-known landmark.
Fionn mac Cumhaill is the hero of Irish legend who gained all knowledge by burning his thumb on a salmon, saved Tara from a fire-breather and, in folk tales, built the Giant's Causeway to reach a Scottish rival. His stories are tied to real hills, rivers and rocks, many of them still named for him.
The route follows his legend from the Boyne of his boyhood through Tara, the Hill of Allen, Slieve Gullion and Benbulben, then to the tall tales of Lough Neagh, the Causeway and Fingal's Cave. Nothing here is history: pins mark where tradition places each tale.
Heracles' first six labours are set across the Peloponnese: Tiryns, Nemea and its lion, Lerna and its Hydra, Ceryneia, Erymanthos and Elis. He must kill a lion no arrow pierces and a many-headed Hydra, and clean a stable of thirty years' dung.
This route follows the first six labours in their traditional order, from the fortress of Tiryns through Nemea, Lerna, Ceryneia, Erymanthos and Elis to Lake Stymphalia. The myth rarely names an exact spot, so most pins mark the place the tale is tied to, not a cave or a lair.
In the summer of 1588 a Spanish fleet appeared off Cornwall with a plan to join Parma's army. Beacons carried the news to London, the English fleet came out of Plymouth, and within weeks fireships, a day of heavy gunnery and autumn storms had ended the plan.
The route follows the campaign through seven places, from the first sighting to a beach in County Sligo where three ships broke up. Most of the fighting was at sea, so the pins mark the nearest coast landmark, and the story of Drake and his game of bowls at Plymouth is labelled as legend.
For eighteen months in 1860 and 1861, relays of light riders on fast horses carried letters 1,900 miles from the Missouri River to California. It took about ten days, was never profitable, and was made obsolete by the telegraph within a year and a half — yet it became one of the great legends of the Old West.
The route follows the mail west through eight places: the stables where the first rider set out, a surviving station in Kansas, Fort Kearny, Julesburg, the plains where Mark Twain saw a rider flash past his stagecoach, Utah, the Nevada desert and the terminus in Sacramento. Where legend (Buffalo Bill, Twain's eight days) outruns the record, the text says so.
In early 1965 Black residents of Selma, Alabama, backed by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and SNCC, pressed for the right to vote. After a state trooper shot Jimmie Lee Jackson in nearby Marion, activists called for a march to the state capital. Troopers stopped the first attempt on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on 7 March; the third march, under federal protection, reached Montgomery on 25 March.
The route follows the marchers from Marion to Selma's Brown Chapel and the bridge, across Lowndes County's muddy campsites and the City of St. Jude to the steps of the Alabama State Capitol. The Voting Rights Act followed that summer. The farm campsites are not pinned exactly.
On the night of 14 April 1865 John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington and escaped on horseback. Lincoln died the next morning in a house across the street; Booth was hunted down twelve days later in a Virginia barn, in what was then the largest manhunt in US history.
The route follows both threads in turn: the theater and the room where Lincoln died, then Booth's road south through the Navy Yard Bridge, a Maryland tavern, a doctor's farmhouse and a swamp, to the farm where it ended.
On the night of 18 April 1775 Paul Revere was rowed across the Charles River, got a horse in Charlestown and rode west to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams that British troops were on the move. He left three accounts of that night, and this route follows them rather than the poem.
It runs through nine places, from his house in North Square and the lanterns at Old North Church to the pasture in Lincoln where a British patrol stopped him, and on to Concord, which Samuel Prescott reached without him. Where a spot is only traditional, the stop says so.
In June 1867 the steamship Quaker City left New York on what Mark Twain called his "Great Pleasure Excursion", a chartered trip to Europe and the Holy Land. A newspaper, the Alta California, paid for his place in exchange for fifty articles, and those letters grew into The Innocents Abroad.
This route follows eight stops: the Wall Street pier, the Azores, Tangier, Milan, Athens, a palace garden near Yalta, Jerusalem and the Sphinx. Each is told through Twain's own scenes, from donkey rides and hotel bills to the places that stopped his jokes. Where he does not name a spot, the pin marks the nearest known place.
On 16 July 1969 a Saturn V lifted the Apollo 11 crew off a Florida launch pad; eight days later their capsule dropped into the Pacific. In between, the first people walked on another world while an estimated 600 million watched on Earth.
The route follows the mission through six stops: the launch pad in Florida, Mission Control in Houston, Tranquility Base on the Moon, the Australian dish that carried the moonwalk pictures, the splashdown and the capsule's museum home. The Moon stop has no pin because the map shows Earth only; its lunar coordinates are given in the text.
In December 1933, eighteen-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the Hook of Holland to walk to Constantinople, carrying a few clothes, some letters of introduction, an anthology of English verse and a volume of Horace. He slept in barns and shepherds' huts, but gentry and aristocracy kept inviting him into their country houses. He wrote the journey up decades later in A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water and The Broken Road.
The route follows him through ten places the sources let us pin, from the Hook and a Stuttgart apartment to Melk, Vienna, Prague, the bridge into Hungary, an island on the Danube that now lies under water, Plovdiv and Istanbul. Many pins are approximate: the sources name a town, not the exact spot where he stood.
In 1960 the novelist John Steinbeck fitted a pickup truck with a camper shell, named it Rocinante and set out from Long Island with his poodle, Charley. He wanted to see his country because he made his living writing about it, and his main question was what Americans are like today.
This route follows eight stops of the outer loop, from Sag Harbor through Maine, Niagara Falls and Minnesota to Montana, Yellowstone and Steinbeck's native Salinas Valley, then down to New Orleans. The book is a novelist's account: it has been challenged as partly fictionalised, so read the encounters as stories and the places as real.
At 11:30 a.m. on 29 May 1953 Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay stood on the summit of Mount Everest, the first people confirmed to have done so. They were part of a British expedition led by Colonel John Hunt, which in the end amounted to over four hundred men, including twenty Sherpa guides and 362 porters.
The route follows that expedition from winter training in Wales through Kathmandu, Thyangboche, Base Camp, the Khumbu Icefall, the Western Cwm and the South Col to the summit, then to the telegraph runner's stop at Namche Bazaar. Pins above Base Camp mark the terrain, not the exact camps of 1953.
Toru Watanabe, a drama student in late-1960s Tokyo, looks back on the years he spent between two women: Naoko, the fragile girlfriend of his dead best friend, and Midori, a classmate who is everything Naoko is not. Haruki Murakami's 1987 novel made him a superstar in Japan.
The route follows Watanabe across the city: his dormitory, a long Sunday walk by the moat, Naoko's apartment in Kokubunji, the campus, the streetcar to Midori's neighbourhood, a house at the edge of Kichijōji and the platform at Ueno. Murakami drew on his own student years, but the novel's dormitory and university are invented, so those two pins mark real stand-ins.
A stranger who looks foreign joins two writers at Patriarch's Ponds, predicts a death, and Moscow's strangest spring begins. In Bulgakov's novel the devil, as Woland, visits Soviet Moscow with a retinue that includes the cat Behemoth and the henchman Azazello, while Margarita bargains with him for the Master.
The route follows the Moscow chapters in order: the ponds where it all starts, a writers' club, a haunted flat, a stage show, a flight of revenge, a ball, a terrace beside the Kremlin and a farewell on the Sparrow Hills. Several places are invented or only inspired by real ones, and each stop says which.
Raskolnikov's St Petersburg on a map: his garret, the pawnbroker's house, Sennaya Square, the canal and the bridges of the Neva. On an exceptionally hot July evening he counts exactly 730 steps to her door, and Dostoevsky hid many addresses behind initials such as "S. Place" and "K. bridge".
This route follows Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov from the garret to the police office. The garret, the pawnbroker's house and the police office are researchers' identifications rather than facts, and are marked as such.
War and Peace travels from the Rostovs' house on Moscow's Povarskaya and Bald Hills, modelled on Yasnaya Polyana, through Schöngrabern and Austerlitz to Borodino, Fili and Poklonnaya Hill in 1812. Prince Andrew falls under the lofty sky at Austerlitz; Pierre, a civilian in a white hat, climbs the Raevsky redoubt.
The route follows the book from a Moscow house and a country estate through Schöngrabern and Austerlitz to 1812: Borodino, the council at Fili and Napoleon waiting on Poklonnaya Hill. Some stops are real places Tolstoy wrote about, others are real stand-ins for places that exist only in the novel; each says which. Dates follow the modern calendar, with Tolstoy's Old Style date noted where it differs.
In 1910 two expeditions set out for the bottom of the world. Roald Amundsen's Norwegians, masters of skis and sled dogs, reached the South Pole on 14 December 1911. Robert Falcon Scott's party arrived on 17 January 1912, 34 days later, to find a Norwegian tent already standing. Amundsen sent his news from Hobart; Scott's party of five died on the return journey.
The route follows both men from Cardiff and Madeira to their bases, up their two glaciers, to the Pole and to the endings: Amundsen's cables from Hobart and Scott's last camp. Antarctic pins mark glaciers and bays, not camps, and the ice has moved since.
On 26 August 1768 the Endeavour left Plymouth with 94 people aboard, bound for Tahiti to watch Venus cross the Sun. Almost three years later she anchored off the Kent coast again, having reached New Zealand and the east coast of Australia, and with many of her people lost to disease on the way home.
The route follows James Cook's own journal and modern accounts through ten stops, from the anchorage at Plymouth to the Great Barrier Reef and Batavia. Dates follow modern accounts, which sometimes differ by a day from the journal.
Huck Finn fakes his own murder and, with Jim, who has run away from slavery, takes a raft down the Mississippi. Their goal is Cairo, where Jim would be a free man the minute he saw it. They miss it in the fog and drift on into slave country, past a feud, two con men and a farm with the book's last twist.
Twain built St. Petersburg from his boyhood town of Hannibal. Most places in the novel are invented, so each pin marks a real landmark or stand-in, and the Grangerfords' country and Bricksville stay off the map.
A retired detective with a fear of heights is hired to follow a friend's wife around San Francisco, because her husband fears she is possessed by Carlotta Valdes, a woman who died in 1857. Hitchcock's 1958 thriller was shot on location in San Francisco, at Mission San Juan Bautista, in Big Basin Redwoods State Park, at Cypress Point on 17-Mile Drive and at Paramount Studios in Hollywood.
This route follows the story in film order through nine places: a vanished restaurant, a Nob Hill apartment block, a mission cemetery and an art museum, a fort under the Golden Gate Bridge, a coastal kiss, a mission bell tower and a hotel with a green neon sign.
Where The Talented Mr. Ripley was filmed: Ischia Ponte and Procida stand in for Mongibello, Anzio plays San Remo, and Marge voices her suspicions at Caffè Florian in Venice. Tom Ripley is paid $1,000 to bring Dickie Greenleaf home, and a seaside friendship becomes a trail of lies and killings.
The route follows the film's order through Ischia and Procida, Anzio, Naples, Rome and Venice. Many places play other places: Ischia and Procida stand in for the fictional village of Mongibello, Anzio plays San Remo, and the "Roman" opera house is in Naples.
