In April 1701 a lord drew a blade inside Edo Castle, and two years later forty-seven of his leaderless samurai stormed the mansion of the man he had attacked. The documented story runs from a corridor in Edo, through a surrendered castle and a quiet retreat near Kyoto, to a night raid and a temple cemetery in Tokyo.
The route sticks to dated events and places. The legend of Chūshingura, the later play, is kept to the final stop, where it is set apart from what happened.
Two Makoto Shinkai films, two love stories that never quite meet: a rainy-morning friendship in a Tokyo garden, and a boy and girl pulled apart across Japan, from a snowbound station in Tochigi to a rocket island in the south.
The route starts with The Garden of Words in Shinjuku Gyoen, then follows 5 Centimeters per Second through its three episodes: Tokyo and Iwafune, Tanegashima, and Tokyo again. Each stop names its film.
Horacio Oliveira, in Paris, spends his nights walking the city with the Maga and the Club de la Serpiente, until a baby's death breaks the group apart. Then the novel moves to Buenos Aires: a circus, a psychiatric clinic and a window over a courtyard.
The route follows the book's real Paris places, from the Pont des Arts to the Montparnasse cemetery, then its Buenos Aires scenes. Most Paris stops come from the Rutas Cervantes literary route; the Buenos Aires ones are invented and unpinned.
On New Year's Eve a Moscow surgeon goes to the bathhouse with his friends, wakes up in Leningrad and walks into a flat that looks exactly like his own. The Soviet classic that Russia still watches every 31 December starts as a joke about identical buildings and ends as a love story.
The route follows Zhenya's night from his new flat and the banya to the Leningrad airport, the identical building, and the station, then back to Moscow. The caveat: both the "Leningrad" and the "Moscow" houses were shot in the same Moscow district, and the story's street had been renamed years before.
In 1466 or 1468 a merchant from Tver set out down the Volga to trade around the Caspian Sea. He was robbed on the way, crossed Persia, sailed from Hormuz to India and wrote down what he saw in A Journey Beyond the Three Seas.
This route follows him from Tver through Derbent, Hormuz and the coast of India to Bidar, and home to Caffa on the Black Sea. Dates are debated, and most stops are marked by area only because his notes name towns rather than buildings.
A baker's oven in Pudding Lane, a gale from the east and a city of timber and pitch: in four days in September 1666 the fire destroyed medieval London, including Old St Paul's. Samuel Pepys watched it from the Tower, from the river and from a church tower, and wrote it all down.
The route follows the fire from its first spark on Sunday morning to its end on Wednesday, then to the Monument and the Golden Boy that remember it. Where the sources give only an area, such as the refugee camps at Moorfields, the pin marks it loosely.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nine years after a night in Vienna, Jesse is on a book tour in Europe when Céline walks into his reading in a Paris bookshop. He has an hour before his flight, and they spend it wandering the city. Richard Linklater's 2004 film plays in real time: the story lasts about as long as the film, roughly eighty minutes.
It was shot in 15 days across Paris, and its locations jump about more than the dialogue admits. This route follows the film's order from the Left Bank bookshop through the Marais and the east of the city to the Seine and a gated courtyard in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.
In 1986 the teenage martial artist Ryo Hazuki comes home to the family dojo in Yokosuka and watches his father, Iwao, die at the hands of Lan Di. Swearing revenge, Ryo follows the killer to Hong Kong in 1987 and on to the mountains of Guilin, and the two games turn that trail into one long walk through a living town, a harbor, a crowded Hong Kong district and a walled city.
The route follows Shenmue and Shenmue II in seven stops. Dobuita Street and Kowloon Walled City are real places the game draws on, the dojo and Bailu Village are invented, and every stop says how closely its pin matches the game.
Where The White Lotus season 3 was filmed: its Thai resort is stitched from the Four Seasons on Ko Samui, the Anantara Mai Khao and the Rosewood in Phuket, and Frank's scenes in Bangkok at the Mandarin Oriental. It opens with gunshots and a body in a lake, then rewinds a week.
This route visits six real places in story order, from the Four Seasons on Ko Samui to a Bangkok hotel and a Muay Thai stadium. The on-screen resort was stitched together from several hotels, so no single place is the White Lotus.
Twin Peaks is set five miles from the Canadian border, but its exteriors come from the Snoqualmie Valley, all around 25–30 miles from Seattle. David Lynch and Mark Frost found the places they had written into the pilot in Snoqualmie, North Bend and Fall City.
This route follows the series through five of them: the falls from the opening titles, the road with the welcome sign, the hotel, the sheriff's station and the diner. Most interiors were built on sets in a San Fernando Valley warehouse, so these stops are exteriors, and the Reinig Road pin marks the road, not one spot.
Downton Abbey is set on a fictional Yorkshire estate between 1912 and 1925, but its great house stands in Hampshire and its village in Oxfordshire. This route follows the story, from the Titanic news of series 1 to the royal visit of the 2019 film, to the real places behind it.
It takes in Highclere Castle, Bampton's church and library, a prison in Lincoln, castles in Scotland and Northumberland, the Ealing stage where the kitchen was built, and the film's parade village and York streets. Lacock's pin marks the village, as the sources name no exact spot.
In AD 79 a mountain above the Bay of Naples blew apart. Pliny the Younger watched from Misenum across the water, lost his uncle, the admiral Pliny the Elder, to the eruption, and years later described it for the historian Tacitus in two letters: the only eyewitness account that survives.
The route follows the eruption in the order of its events, from the mountain's first column to Pompeii, Herculaneum, the beach at Stabiae and back to Misenum. Pliny's letters never mention Pompeii or Herculaneum, so those stops come from archaeology. The traditional date is 24 August, but newer evidence points to the autumn.
The Hound of the Baskervilles takes Sherlock Holmes across Dartmoor: Cabell's tomb at Buckfastleigh, the ten-thirty train from Paddington, Princetown's prison and Hound Tor. A spectral hound stalks the moor.
The route runs from the grave that may have inspired the legend and the ten-thirty train from Paddington to the convict prison at Princetown, the mire, the tors and the Stapletons' house. Baskerville Hall and Merripit House exist only in the book, so their pins mark a stand-in or nothing at all.
In April 1625 an eighteen-year-old Gascon rides into the market town of Meung on a yellow pony, bound for Paris and the King's Musketeers. Dumas's novel follows D'Artagnan from that first quarrel through duels, a secret night in the Louvre, a bet made during a siege and a midnight ending on a river bank.
The route runs from the Loire to Paris, on to La Rochelle and Portsmouth, and back to the banks of the Lys. The streets, squares and palaces are real; most inns, houses and bastions are Dumas's, so several pins mark a town or a street rather than a building.
Ghost of Yōtei follows Atsu, a wandering mercenary who returns to Ezo — modern-day Hokkaido — in 1603 to hunt down the Yōtei Six, the band led by the samurai lord Nariaki Saito who slaughtered her family sixteen years earlier. Her revenge carries her across an island modelled on Hokkaido, from the grasslands at Mount Yōtei's foot to the frozen north and the Matsumae clan's castle in the south.
This route follows the game's regions and their real counterparts: the Yotei Grasslands around Lake Shikotsu, the Ishikari Plain, the Ainu country of the Nayoro Wilds, the Kitsune's Teshio Ridge, and the Tokachi Range, with Mount Yōtei and Matsumae Castle as its fixed points.
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.
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.
Much of Game of Thrones' North was filmed in Northern Ireland. Winterfell, its godswood, Castle Black, the Kingsroad and a fishing harbour that played Pyke were all real ground dressed as Westeros, and a basalt hillside above a small Antrim village hosts the first execution of the series.
The route runs in the order the episodes aired: the deserter's beheading above Cairncastle and the Winterfell of Castle Ward, then the quarry that held Castle Black and the Wall, the godswood, the Kingsroad beech avenue and the harbour where Theon Greyjoy comes home. The last stop is the Moneyglass estate, where a bigger Winterfell was built for the second season and used again for the eighth season's battle. Almost everything here is exterior: Winterfell's great hall was a soundstage set.
