In July 1497 four ships left Lisbon to find a sea route to India. Vasco da Gama's fleet crossed the open South Atlantic, rounded the Cape, worked its way up the African coast, and reached Calicut on 20 May 1498. The voyage ended with two ships and over half the men lost.
The route follows the voyage from the Restelo shore in Lisbon to Calicut, then home via Anjediva and the Azores. Landing sites are mostly debated or only broadly known, so most pins are approximate. Dates are as the sources give them, in the Julian calendar then in use.
Attack on Titan is set behind three great walls, but its author comes from a real mountain town in Ōita, Japan. Hajime Isayama grew up in Ōyama, now part of Hita, and used the landscape around it as the model for his world.
The route follows the town from his birthplace to the 2014 event that made him Tourism Ambassador, and then to the statues of Eren, Mikasa, Armin and Levi that Hita set up in 2020 and 2021. The sources do not tie the series to any single real wall, so the stops mark the town's own tributes.
In September 1786 Goethe slipped away from Carlsbad at 3 in the morning, telling none of his friends, and headed for Italy. He was arrested for drawing a castle, met the ancient world at Verona, and shared a house in Rome with a painter.
The route follows his diary from Carlsbad over the Brenner and the Italian lakeshore to Verona, Venice and Rome, then to Vesuvius and Sicily. Some stops are towns or mountains rather than single buildings; the pin accuracy says which.
In 1799 the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and the French botanist Aimé Bonpland sailed for Spain's American realms and spent five years measuring, collecting and climbing across them. They watched electric eels fight wild horses in Venezuela, pushed up Chimborazo, watched a planet cross the Sun from Peru and ended as Jefferson's guest at the White House.
This route follows eight stops from the landing at Cumaná to Washington in 1804. Several pins are approximate because the sources name a region or river rather than one spot.
In March 1697 a great Russian embassy left Moscow for Europe, and the tsar went with it incognito as "Peter Mikhailov", though at 2.03 metres he was one of the tallest men around. He worked in shipyards, studied gunnery and tried to broaden the Holy League against the Ottoman Empire.
The route follows the journey stop by stop: Riga and Königsberg, the Dutch shipyards, London and Deptford, then Vienna and the meeting with Augustus II at Rava-Ruska. Dates follow each source: the Dutch article uses the Gregorian calendar, the English and Russian sources the Old Style, so the labels say which.
A girl from a rich family disguises herself as a boy to go to school, falls in love with a classmate who never guesses, and is promised to another man. When he dies, the earth opens at his grave and the two fly away as butterflies. One of China's four great folk tales, it is often called the oriental Romeo and Juliet.
The route follows the tale from the heroine's home in Shangyu, to the school in Hangzhou, to the Ningbo temple and tomb, then to a rival claim in Yixing and a statue in Verona. Every Chinese site is local tradition rather than proven history.
Ang Lee's wuxia romance sends a retired swordsman, a runaway governor's daughter and a stolen sword across a China that was assembled from many places. The film began shooting in Xinjiang on 31 July 1999 and then moved to the Jiangnan region and Beijing.
This route follows the story through the real locations behind it: a desert ghost city, two Anhui villages, the Anji bamboo forest, and Cangyan Mountain, which plays the fictional Wudang. The real Mount Wudang sits in the story, but the film was not shot there.
On 6 August 1945 an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima; three days later, another on Nagasaki. This route follows the two days on the ground, from the bridge that served as the aiming point to the places that survived or were rebuilt.
It starts in Hiroshima at Aioi Bridge, the hypocenter and the Dome, then moves to Nagasaki's hypocenter, cathedral and shrine, and ends with the two museums and parks built in 1955. Death tolls are estimates and are given as the ranges researchers publish.
Between 1180 and 1185 Japan's two great warrior clans, Taira and Minamoto, fought over the realm, and the war ended with a child emperor, a fleet and the tide at Dan-no-ura. It was the war that led to the first shogun.
This route visits seven battlefield sites in date order, from the bridge at Uji to the Kanmon Straits. Documented events are kept apart from the Heike Monogatari's legends, which the text attributes to the tale. Most battle areas are approximate.
In Jujutsu Kaisen, 31 October 2018 turns Shibuya Station into a sealed trap, and the fighting that follows is the best-known arc of the series. The places in the story are real ones, from the station's lowest platform to Aoyama Cemetery.
This route follows the Shibuya Incident through the real district: the cemetery, Hikarie, the station, Meiji-jingumae, Mark City and the Scramble Crossing. Several scenes are only tied to a building or an area, so those stops are approximate.
Sailor Moon is a fantasy about moon princesses and magical warriors, but its home ground is a real Tokyo neighbourhood. Author Naoko Takeuchi had lived in Azabu-Jūban, and apart from the fantasy elements most places in the story are modelled on real ones nearby.
This route visits five of them: the shopping street, a park under a highway, two shrines that stand in for the Hikawa Shrine of the story, and Tokyo Tower. The manga and the older anime sometimes used different real models, and the two shrine pins mark real stand-ins for the story's invented Hikawa Shrine.
Hitori Goto is a guitarist who loves music and can hardly talk to anyone. Her band, Kessoku Band, plays at a small live house in Shimokitazawa, and the story stays close to real music towns in Tokyo and Kanagawa.
This route follows the band from the stage that inspired STARRY to Hitori's home station and a summer day on Enoshima. Two venues are invented and modelled on real live houses; the pins mark those models.
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.
In July 1911 a Yale lecturer went looking for the last capital of the Incas and found Machu Picchu instead, guided by a Peruvian innkeeper and a farmer's young son.
The route follows the Yale Peruvian Expedition from Cusco down the Urubamba to the ruins, then on to Vitcos and Espíritu Pampa, where the real answer sat unrecognised. The city had already been visited locally, and Bingham's conclusion about it proved mistaken.
The French Way is the most popular route of the ancient pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, It starts at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, crosses the Pyrenees, and from Roncesvalles on the Spanish side still runs about 780 kilometres west to Galicia. It is on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
This route follows it through seven landmarks: a mountain gate, a village of legend, a pilgrims' bridge, a great cathedral, a knights' tournament, a Galician hilltop and the tomb of St James.
Semyon Gorbunkov, a modest Soviet economist on his first trip abroad, slips on a watermelon rind in Istanbul, says "Damn it!" and ends up with a smugglers' plaster cast full of jewels on his arm. Gaidai's 1968 comedy needed a foreign city, and found it in Baku.
The route follows the film across its filming sites: the old streets and palace of Baku that play Istanbul, then the southern coast and a Moscow wasteland that play the heroes' home town. Only the Baku and Kiselyov Rock stops are pinned to a specific place; the rest are approximate.
Danila Bagrov comes home from the First Chechen War, goes to look for his older brother in Saint Petersburg and ends up a hitman by accident. In the sequel he is in Moscow and then Chicago, chasing the men who threaten a dead friend's twin brother.
The route follows Danila through Vitebsky Station, the Adamini House, a market and a cemetery in Petersburg, then Moscow and the American stops. Several stops are filming locations standing in for the story's places.
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.
Pushkin's only completed novel follows Pyotr Grinev, a young officer sent to a log-fenced fortress on the Orenburg steppe, where he falls in love with the captain's daughter Masha and crosses paths with Pugachev, the rebel who claims to be Emperor Peter III. The book is a romanticized account of Pugachev's Rebellion of 1773-1774, not a record of it.
The route follows the novel from besieged Orenburg through the Belogorsk fortress, Berda, Kazan, Tsarskoye Selo and Moscow. Each stop separates what Pushkin invented from what history records; Belogorsk exists only on the page, with the real fortress of Tatishchevo as its stand-in.
In Gogol's Petersburg nothing is what it seems: the grandest street is a liar, a nose walks about in a state councillor's uniform, and a dead clerk tears coats off passers-by. Three of his stories share one city, and most of their stops can still be walked.
The route runs along Nevsky Prospekt and its neighbouring streets, from the painter's and the lieutenant's chases in Nevsky Prospekt, through The Nose's barber, cathedral, bridge, garden and shop, to the Kalinkin Bridge where the ghost of The Overcoat is said to prowl. A few stops are approximate, since Gogol seldom gives house numbers.
Grigory Pechorin, bored and brilliant, drifts through the Caucasus leaving damage behind him: a smuggler's hut at Taman, the spa season at Pyatigorsk and Kislovodsk, and a duel on a cliff ledge. Lermontov wrote five linked tales and was himself killed in a duel at Pyatigorsk in 1841.
The route follows the book's order, from a snowy pass and a seaport to the spring, the harp pavilion and the rock gate where Pechorin plays his games, ending on Mashuk where the author met his own fate. Some pins mark real places that only stand in for the novel's.
In 1927 a former nobleman and a charming con man chase twelve dining chairs, one of them hiding family jewels, across the Soviet Union. Ilf and Petrov's comic novel follows them from a sleepy provincial town through Moscow and the Volga to the spa of Pyatigorsk, the Caucasus road and the Crimean coast.
The route marks six stops; Stargorod and Vasyuki are invented, so their pins are only candidate stand-ins.
Takumi Fujiwara delivers tofu every morning in his father's old Toyota AE86, and without knowing it he becomes the fastest downhill driver in Gunma. Shuichi Shigeno's street racing manga sends him against rival teams from mountain after mountain.
Some names are fictionalized, but all of the locations in the series are based on actual places in Japan. The route follows them from Mount Haruna, the real Akina, to Akagi, Myōgi and Irohazaka, then returns to the lake and to the museum that keeps the tofu shop's storefront.
In Anohana, six childhood friends drift apart after one of them, Menma, dies in an accident. Years later her ghost appears to Jinta, the group's former leader, and asks for a wish to be granted, and the old friends gather again in their hometown of Chichibu, Saitama.
The town is real, and the route follows the places the anime shows: the hill and overlook of Hitsujiyama Park, a road beside the railway, two bridges over the Arakawa, the temple where the friends keep gathering, and the festival scaffold where their homemade firework is launched. The secret base itself has no real-life twin.
