Catalog
87 routes found
In April 1519 Cortés landed on the coast of Veracruz; in August 1521 the Aztec capital fell. In between came alliances, a massacre, a night of disaster on a causeway and an eight-month siege. The route follows the campaign from Villa Rica to Tlatelolco and sets the Spanish accounts of Cortés and Díaz beside Tlaxcalan and Aztec ones where they are known. Where the accounts conflict, the stop says so.
Pixar's Coco follows the boy Miguel from his shoemaking family's town of Santa Cecilia into the Land of the Dead on the Day of the Dead. Neither world exists on a map, but the filmmakers drew on real Mexican villages, families and festivals, and Mexican guides have since linked more places to it. This route follows five of those places in the order the story needs them. Almost every link is an inspiration, not a filming location, and the pins say so.
Jorge Luis Borges is the writer who turned a library into a metaphor for the universe, yet his own life ran through very real places in Buenos Aires: a poor Palermo childhood, a basement library job, and eighteen years as director of the National Library. This route follows him from his birthplace barrio and a famous café to the two library buildings he knew, with one fictional stop: the Calle Garay house where "The Aleph" sees everything at once.
Lázaro, a hungry boy born in a river mill, serves a string of cruel masters on the roads of Spain. The picaresque classic is told in his own sly voice, and it lets a reader trace his path from the bridge in Salamanca to the streets of Toledo. This route follows his early years: the stone bull, the grapes at Almorox, the revenge at Escalona, the miser priest at Maqueda and the squire's empty house in Toledo. Most places are named only as towns, so most pins are approximate.
Vasily Livanov and Vitaly Solomin's Soviet Holmes and Watson were made when filming abroad was impossible, so a Riga lane became Baker Street, a Petersburg station became Victoria and a waterfall in Abkhazia became the Reichenbach Falls. The route follows the Lenfilm television films of 1979 to 1986 from the Riga street with the screen 221b to Peterhof, Saint Petersburg, the Gega Waterfall and Tallinn.
On 19 October 1812 the Grande Armée walked out of Moscow after five weeks of occupation. Six weeks later, what was left of it scrambled across the Berezina on two hastily built bridges. In between lay a blocked road, a burning town, a depleted depot, a blizzard and a river full of ice. The route follows six places on that march, from the mined Kremlin through Maloyaroslavets, Vyazma, Smolensk and Krasny to the crossing at Studienka. Most pins mark a town or village, not a battlefield.
Contains accounts of deaths in extreme cold. In January 1959 a group of ten experienced hikers from the Ural Polytechnical Institute set out on a ski trek into the northern Urals. Nine never came back: they cut their way out of their tent on a mountain slope one February night and died in the snow, and the cause is still discussed. This route follows the group from the institute in Sverdlovsk by train and lorry to the last village, then up to the mountain and the pass now named after them, and ends with the survivor's memorial. It sticks to the record; the explanations are left to the reader. The exact tent site is approximate.
At 82, Leo Tolstoy slipped out of his house in the night, boarded a train with no destination in mind and was dead within ten days. The route follows that flight of November 1910, from his estate through two monasteries to a small railway station that suddenly drew the attention of the world. It covers six stops in the Tula, Kaluga and Lipetsk regions. Three stops are approximate: two railway stations pinned by map search, and Astapovo, pinned on its village.
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.
Nioh sends William Adams, a blond outsider who becomes Ieyasu's ally, through a dark-fantasy version of 1600: demons in the mud of Japan's civil wars, alchemist Edward Kelley behind them, and Tokugawa Ieyasu rising above it all. Its story is stitched onto real places, from a London prison to the battlefield that made the Tokugawa shoguns. 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.
The greatest of the Icelandic sagas is a story of two friends, one famous for his strength and one for his wisdom, and of how a chain of insults, killings and neat legal settlements drags both families towards a night of fire. It is told almost entirely in real places in south and south-west Iceland. The route runs from the national assembly at Þingvellir, where Gunnar meets his future wife, through Gunnar's farm at Hlíðarendi, an ice-bank leap on the Markarfljót and the Law Rock, to Njáll's farm at Bergþórshvoll. The saga names the farms, but not every exact spot, so some pins mark the area.
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.
In June 1995 Cheryl Strayed, 26 and with no hiking experience, set out alone to walk 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. Her memoir Wild reached No. 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list, and Reese Witherspoon played her in the 2014 film. This route follows the hike north from the Mojave Desert to the Columbia River, using the memoir's outline and the film's best-known scenes. The film compresses and dramatises, so stops drawn from it say so, and pins mark areas rather than campsites.
On 10 November 1871, on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, the journalist Henry M. Stanley took off his hat in front of a crowd and said, as he tells it in his own book, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" The explorer many thought dead had been found, after nearly eight months on the road from the coast. The route follows Stanley's account, How I Found Livingstone, over eight stops: from Zanzibar and Bagamoyo through Mpwapwa, Tabora and the Malagarasi to Ujiji, then up the lake to Mugere and back to the parting at Tabora. Stanley's camps are rarely identifiable today, so every pin is approximate.
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.
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.
In 1271 a seventeen-year-old Venetian set out with his father and uncle for the court of Kublai Khan and did not come home for 24 years. Years later, in a Genoese prison, he dictated what he had seen to a fellow inmate, and The Travels of Marco Polo was the result. The route follows the book from Venice and Acre to the Persian Gulf, across the Pamir highlands and the desert to Kublai's summer and winter capitals, south to Hangzhou and the port of Zayton, and home again. Some of the roads are reconstructed by scholars, and Polo sometimes exaggerates, so each stop notes where the evidence is thin.
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.
Private First Class Ronald "Red" Daniels lands on Omaha Beach on D-Day with the 1st Infantry Division and fights his way into Germany with one squad, until a friend is captured and the search for him ends at a concentration camp. Call of Duty: WWII is a 2017 game by Sledgehammer Games, and its campaign is set among real battles. The route follows the missions in order: Omaha Beach, Marigny, Aachen, the Hürtgen Forest, the Ardennes, the bridge at Remagen and Berga, with the real battle each one echoes. Pins mark battle areas, not a mission's exact street.
Battlefield 1 sends its soldiers across the Western Front, the Italian Front, Gallipoli and Arabia. This route follows the War Stories and multiplayer maps that go with them, from the Suez Canal in 1915 to Monte Grappa in October 1918. Stops run in the order of the real battles, not the game's menu. The maps are the game's own reconstructions, so each pin marks the real ground behind a level, and one stop is a village the game invented.
Tony Soprano's mob is a New Jersey one, and the series made a point of it: the majority of its exterior scenes were filmed on location in the state, with most interiors built at Silvercup Studios in New York. The route follows the opening titles from the Pulaski Skyway to the Soprano house, then the pork store, the Great Falls, the Bada Bing, the Pine Barrens and the diner of the finale. The Pine Barrens episode was filmed in New York, and the house is a private home, so its pin marks only the borough.