The 1965 film of Maria von Trapp's life was shot on real locations around Salzburg between March and September 1964, and almost all of them can still be visited. This route follows Maria from the mountain meadow and her abbey through the fountains and gardens of the song sequences to the villa terrace, the wedding church and the festival hall where the family sings its way to freedom.
The stops run in story order, from the Bavarian opening to the festival escape. One caveat: the famous cemetery hiding place never existed; it was a Hollywood studio set modelled on St Peter's Graveyard.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) sends Indy from a Boy Scout outing in the Utah desert to the rock-cut façade of Petra, chasing the Holy Grail and his missing father. Three trials guard the cup at the end. The film borrows its scenery from half of Europe, the Middle East and the American West.
Nine stops, most of them still standing: the Arches canyons of the opening, the church façade in Venice's Campo San Barnaba that plays the library, an Eifel castle dressed as Brunwald, a San Francisco building that played Berlin's Tempelhof airport, the Almería beach where Henry brings down a fighter with an umbrella, a Granada station playing Alexandretta, the Tabernas tank chase, the Treasury that fronts the Grail's temple, and the Texas sunset the film ends on. Dates are story time; filming ran from May 1988 to early 1989.
Walter Mitty manages photo negatives at Life magazine in New York and escapes his dull days in elaborate daydreams. When the negative chosen for the last print cover goes missing, he has to track down its photographer, Sean O'Connell — to Greenland, Iceland and the Himalayas. Ben Stiller's 2013 film was shot on analog film, and almost all of its adventure was shot in Iceland.
This route starts at Life's real Manhattan home and then follows Walter through the Icelandic towns, harbour, mountain road, volcano and waterfall that stand in for Greenland and Afghanistan. The places are real; which country they play is not.
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.
In 1989 communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe came apart in a few months — through round-table talks in Poland, a picnic on the Hungarian border, candlelit marches in Leipzig, a muddled press conference in Berlin, students in Prague and a bloody uprising in Romania. Each country had its own causes, but every crack made the next one easier.
The route visits the exact places where it happened, most of them marked today by a memorial, a museum or a plaque: the shipyard gate where Solidarity was born, the palace of the Round Table, the old border road near Sopron, the church in Leipzig, the bridge at Bornholmer Straße, a street corner in Prague, a pastor's flat in Timișoara and the balcony in Bucharest.
