Sadko is a poor gusli player from Novgorod whose music wins the favour of the Sea Tsar, a golden fish and a fortune, until the sea demands payment. The story is best known abroad through Rimsky-Korsakov's opera.
The route follows the tale through the real geography it grew from: the merchants' market, Lake Ilmen, the Volkhov trade route, the river's source, and the Novgorod church of the man Sadko may be based on. None of the places is named exactly in the tale, so all pins are approximate.
A Russian student expelled from university in 1864 ends up living among people in north-eastern New Guinea who had never seen a European. Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay was a zoologist and anthropologist, an early follower of Darwin who refuted the view that human races were different species.
The route follows him from Haeckel's Jena and the Canary Islands to Astrolabe Bay, the Sydney research station he founded, and his grave in St Petersburg. Most pins are approximate: the sources name regions, not camps.
In the Soviet series Seventeen Moments of Spring, a spy named Stierlitz serves in the SS in Berlin in the last weeks of the Second World War. Very little of it was filmed in the Berlin of 1945.
This route follows the story through the places that played its settings, from a Moscow-region park posing as the Bavarian Forest to Riga, Meissen and the hills of Georgia standing in for Bern and the Alps. Every pin marks a stand-in, not a place from the plot.
Charlotte and Emily Brontë grew up in a parsonage on the edge of the Pennine moors, and the landscape of both novels still runs through the places they knew: a harsh school, a house with a famous library, a ruined farm on the heights.
The route starts at the Haworth parsonage, goes to the school behind Lowood, then up to the farms said to lie behind Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights, and ends in Derbyshire at the hall behind Thornfield. Most identifications are traditional, not proven, and each pin says so.
In March 1917 Nicholas II came home from abdication to the palace where his family had lived as emperor and empress. Sixteen months later none of them was alive. In between lay exile: first under the Provisional Government, then under the Bolsheviks, ever farther east.
The route follows that road from the Alexander Palace through the governor's house in Tobolsk to Yekaterinburg and the forest sites nearby, where the story ended and where it was later argued over. It is told plainly, and the final stops are places of mourning for many visitors.
In the early 1900s a Russian army surveyor, Vladimir Arsenyev, mapped the wild Ussuri taiga with the help of Dersu Uzala, an indigenous hunter who read the forest better than any map. Arsenyev's memoir became a classic, and Akira Kurosawa turned it into an Oscar-winning film in 1975.
The route follows the story from Vladivostok to Lake Khanka and the Sikhote-Alin, then to Khabarovsk, Dersu's lost grave and the film's shooting base. Pins mark regions and towns, not exact campsites.
In 2035 Artyom leaves the Moscow Metro on a stolen train, the Aurora, and finds that Russia beyond the city is still alive. The sequel to Metro 2033 turns a Moscow underground story into a rail journey across the whole country.
The route follows the Volga, the Ark at Yamantau, the Caspian and Novosibirsk to Lake Baikal. The game's places are invented versions of real ones, so every pin is an area, not a level.
Basim Ibn Ishaq begins as a street thief with big dreams and ends as a Hidden One in the middle of a hunt for the Order of the Ancients. Ubisoft sets his story in 9th-century Baghdad, in the turbulent years of the Anarchy at Samarra, when the Abbasid caliphs were losing control of their own court.
The route follows him from the ruined town of Anbar to the mountain fortress of Alamut, through the districts of Baghdad and on to the oasis of al-Ula. Little of the Round City survives and the House of Wisdom is gone, so those pins are approximate; the Iraqi stops are for reading, not visiting.
Red Army soldier Sukhov wants only to go home to his wife, but the desert keeps handing him other people's problems: a man buried to the neck, a harem left in his care, a bandit leader on the loose. The 1969 Soviet classic turned a handful of desert locations into film legend.
The route follows the shoot in two expeditions: the Caspian shore and the Sarykum dune in Dagestan, then the Karakum sands and the ruins of Merv in Turkmenistan. Several stops are approximate, because the film's village was a temporary set.
Grigory Melekhov loves another man's wife, goes to war, and changes sides in the Civil War four times. Sholokhov's novel of the Don Cossacks grew out of the Upper Don, and its landscape is still there.
The route moves from the invented hamlet of Tatarsky to Vyoshenskaya, the stanitsa of the 1919 uprising, then to the villages where Sholokhov lived and wrote. Tatarsky and the monument are marked approximately.
Pushkin's novel in verse follows a bored St. Petersburg dandy who inherits a country estate, rejects a girl's love letter, kills his friend in a duel, and years later finds her transformed into the star of Petersburg society.
The route runs from the capital's garden walks to the road into Moscow and the exile estate where he wrote part of the book. Most places in the verse are glimpsed rather than described, so several pins are approximate or stand-ins.
In the summer of 1935 the young Laurie Lee left London for Spain with a violin and a single Spanish phrase. For a year he walked and played his way from Galicia to the Andalusian coast, sleeping under the open sky or in cheap posadas, welcomed even by the poorest villagers.
The route follows his memoir from Vigo through Zamora, Toledo, Tarifa and Málaga to Almuñécar, where he was rescued by a British destroyer as the Spanish Civil War began. Pins mark towns, not the roads he actually walked.
In autumn 1988 the BBC sent Michael Palin round the globe in the footsteps of Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg, with no aircraft allowed. It began and ended at the Reform Club in London and ran from 25 September to 12 December.
The route follows nine moments from his own day-by-day captions and diary excerpts: Venice, the Pyramids, a dhow from Dubai to Bombay, Hong Kong, a train to Shanghai, the Pacific, an Aspen balloon and a locked door in Pall Mall. Pins mark cities and landmarks; the real line of travel ran between them.
In 1973 Paul Theroux set out from London Victoria on a four-month railway loop through Europe, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, then came back on the Trans-Siberian Railway. His travelogue, published in 1975, became a classic of the genre.
This route follows episodes the book's reviewers single out, from the Direct-Orient Express to Istanbul, Calcutta, Burma, Vietnam and Tokyo. The book's own text could not be checked, so some pins mark a city's station rather than a scene, and some places are not safe to visit now.
In 1974 Bruce Chatwin set out for Patagonia to find his own "piece of brontosaurus": a scrap of skin sent to his grandmother by her cousin, Charley Milward the sailor. Six months of travel became In Patagonia, the book that made his name.
This route follows the quest from a natural history museum in La Plata through the Welsh coast, Butch Cassidy's cabin and Milward's house in Punta Arenas, to the cave where the skin was found. Chatwin's tales were not always literal, so most pins mark areas, not scenes.
In the spring of 2004 Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman set out from London on motorcycles, heading east for New York with cinematographer Claudio von Planta. The ride ran from 14 April to 29 July and crossed twelve countries and 18,887 miles.
The route follows the highlights: a church built of bones in the Czech Republic, a UNICEF project in Mongolia, the mud of the Zilov Gap, the Road of Bones to Magadan, Mount Rushmore and the ride into New York. Pins mark places and areas; the real line of travel ran between them.
Bridgerton is set in London, but most of its streets are in Bath, its parks are in Wiltshire and its family home is in Greenwich.
This route follows the filming locations from the Royal Crescent and Lady Danbury's house in Bath, through London and Kent, to the country houses that played Clyvedon and Aubrey Hall in the first two seasons.
Tommy Shelby's gang rules 1919 Birmingham, but the streets, trains and mansions you see on screen are mostly somewhere else.
The route follows the story from Small Heath, through the Liverpool street that played Watery Lane, a Yorkshire railway, Aunt Polly's village and the Black Country, to Bradford's warehouses, Tommy's country house and the beach where series 4 ends. Most pins mark stand-ins, labelled as such.
In 1937 Amelia Earhart tried to become the first woman to fly around the world, on a roughly equatorial route. Two attempts, a crash in Hawaii and a lost radio signal over the Pacific turned her flight into one of history's great mysteries.
The route follows both attempts, from Oakland and Pearl Harbor to Miami, Lae and Howland Island, and ends at Nikumaroro, where one theory says she and her navigator came down. That final stop is only a hypothesis.
Disguised as a beggar, a Belgian-French explorer walked into the forbidden city of Lhasa among pilgrims. Alexandra David-Néel and her adopted son Yongden stayed two months in 1924, then slipped away before the governor could act.
The route follows her from Kumbum, where she studied for years, across the Kyi to the Potala and the Monlam crowds, then on to Samye, Tsetang and Gyantse. Pins are area-level, and critics have disputed her account since 1972.
In 1857 two British officers set out from Zanzibar to find the Great Lakes rumoured to lie in the centre of the continent and, they hoped, the source of the Nile. They found two lakes, and then fell out over what they had found.
The route runs from a failed Somali expedition through Zanzibar, Kazeh and Ujiji to Lake Victoria, then on to Speke's Ripon Falls and the Bath debate that never happened. All pins are approximate, as the sources name regions and towns rather than exact spots.
A failed Spanish expedition to Florida left four survivors, and one of them, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, walked and traded his way across the continent over roughly eight years before meeting Spaniards again in Mexico. He wrote his account from memory.
The route runs from Spain through Cuba, Florida and the Texas coast to Culiacán and Mexico City. Most stops are approximate, and the middle of the journey is not traced because historians cannot fix his route.
David Lean's 1962 epic follows T. E. Lawrence through the Arab Revolt, but most of its Arabia was built in Spain. Seville played Cairo, Jerusalem and Damascus, while Almería and a beach near Carboneras supplied the desert and a whole replica of Aqaba.
The route follows the story's order and keeps history apart from the film's shooting locations. Stops say plainly whether they show what happened in 1917 or where the cameras stood.
A man with no memory, a safe deposit box and a CIA programme that wants him gone: Jason Bourne runs across Europe and beyond, and the films keep him on real streets, stations and squares.
The route follows the three films in order, from Zurich and Paris through Mykonos, Berlin and Moscow to London and Tangier. Several cities were stand-ins for others, so the pins mark the story's places or honest approximations.
