Il Postino (1994) was filmed on two islands: Procida in the Gulf of Naples, where Mario delivers Pablo Neruda's mail around Marina Corricella, Via San Rocco and Piazza dei Martiri, and Salina in the Aeolian Islands, whose Pollara bay hosts Neruda's house and a beach.
The film moves the story to Italy around 1950 and never names the island. This route follows the real places: the waterfront bar where Mario meets Beatrice, the village street, the post office square and the two beaches.
East of Eden is set in California's Salinas Valley, mostly between the start of the twentieth century and the end of World War I, and its places are Salinas, King City and the farmland between them. The 1955 James Dean film moved the story to Monterey on screen but was shot largely in Mendocino, with scenes in Spreckels and the valley.
This route follows John Steinbeck's novel through the valley, Kate's town of Salinas and the film's locations, so you can see where the story and the screen version happen.
Commissaire Dupin is set in Brittany: Jean-Luc Bannalec's detective, a Paris policeman transferred to Concarneau, solves murders in Pont-Aven, on the Glénan islands and in the Guérande salt marshes.
This route follows the first three novels, Bretonische Verhältnisse, Bretonische Brandung and Bretonisches Gold, then looks at how the TV series borrows other places such as Saint-Malo. Settings in the story are partly invented.
Gran Turismo, Forza and Assetto Corsa race on real circuits: the Nürburgring Nordschleife, Spa-Francorchamps, Monza, Le Mans, Suzuka and Laguna Seca.
This route lists six tracks you can drive in racing games, with what each game does with them and the real circuit behind the screen. Game appearances differ by title and year.
Lampedusa's The Leopard is set in Palermo and the fictional Donnafugata, which is really Santa Margherita di Belice; Visconti's 1963 film borrowed Ciminna and Palazzo Gangi for the same scenes.
The route follows the Prince of Salina through the Sicily of 1860: his observatory villa near Palermo, the ruined town palace of the author's family, the country estate at Donnafugata and the great ball. The novel's places are partly invented, so each stop says how closely the pin matches the page.
Raiders of the Lost Ark is set in 1936 Peru and Egypt, but it was shot on Kauaʻi, in Tunisia and in the U-boat pens of La Rochelle. Kairouan stood in for Cairo, the canyon outside Tozeur became the truck chase, and Hawaii played the Peruvian jungle.
This route follows the film's story order through six filming places, from Hulēʻia and the Nā Pali Coast on Kauaʻi and the Stockton campus used for Jones's school to Kairouan, the Sidi Bouhlel canyon and La Rochelle. Several spots are only approximate and some are closed to the public.
Conan the Barbarian was filmed across Spain: the Cimmerian village at Valsaín, the Wheel of Pain near Solosancho, the witch's rocks at the Ciudad Encantada, and the deserts, dunes and salt marshes of Almería.
The Hyborian Age is invented; every stop here is a real place. The route follows the film from the raid on Conan's village to the Mountain of Power, and ends at Shepperton Studios in England, where an older King Conan speaks the closing lines.
Hocus Pocus is set in Salem, Massachusetts, on Halloween, and filmed at Pioneer Village, Salem Common, the Ropes Mansion and Old Town Hall.
The route follows the film from the 1693 prologue at Pioneer Village through the high school on Essex Street, Salem Common, Old Burial Hill in Marblehead, Max's house on Ocean Avenue and the Ropes Mansion, then to the town party at Old Town Hall and the Park Plaza Hotel ballroom in Los Angeles. Most Salem scenes are exteriors; the interiors were studio work in Burbank.
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.
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.
In March 1976 a film crew came to southern Tunisia and turned it into another planet. George Lucas had selected Tunisia to provide the desert planet setting for Star Wars, and filming in Tunisia began on March 22, 1976: a troglodyte hotel became the Lars homestead, the salt flats became a moisture farm, and the streets of Ajim on Djerba became the Mos Eisley spaceport.
When the prequels called, the crews came back: locations at Onk Jemal in Tozeur, Ksar Ouled Soltane and Ksar Hadada were used for Tatooine scenes in the 1998 shoot, from the Boonta Eve podrace track to the slave quarters where the boy Anakin lived. Abandoned sets for the filming have been left in the desert but can be visited — this route links all eight sites, from the droids' landing dunes to the granary-courtyard slave quarters.
In 1977 Robyn Davidson, then in her twenties, walked about 2,700 kilometres from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean with four camels and her dog, crossing some of the emptiest desert on earth. She had spent two years in Alice Springs learning to train wild camels. She had no plan to write about it, but a National Geographic article and photographs by Rick Smolan made her famous, and her 1980 book Tracks became a classic, filmed in 2013.
The route follows her line west across the Northern Territory and Western Australia in order. Much of it crosses Aboriginal land, where she travelled with a Pitjantjatjara elder, Mr Eddie; pins mark communities and stations, not sacred sites.
On 12 March 1930 Mahatma Gandhi, aged 60, walked out of his ashram in Ahmedabad with 78 followers, heading for the sea. His target was the British monopoly on salt, a tax that touched every Indian household. Twenty-four days and about 385 kilometres later, on a beach at Dandi, he picked up a lump of salty mud and broke the law — and millions followed.
The route follows the march south through Gujarat in its real order, with the dates from the day-by-day itinerary: the ashram, the first night's halt, the Kheda country, Borsad, Surat and Dandi, where a memorial now stands. The final stop covers what came next: Gandhi's arrest and the beatings at the Dharasana salt works that shocked the world.
