Catalog
267 routes found
Legend and archaeology meet at six places, from Agamemnon's citadel to Odysseus's island. Each stop is told from Homer's text, with what archaeologists have found kept apart and honestly labelled. The route follows the epic from the fleet at Aulis to the plain of the Scamander, then the Odyssey's road home via Pylos and Ithaca. Many identifications here are traditional or disputed, and the pins show it.
In spring 1453 Sultan Mehmed II besieged the last Byzantine capital with a new fortress, huge cannons and ships hauled over a hill. Constantine XI held out for weeks, and the city fell on 29 May. This route follows the siege in order: the fortress on the Bosphorus, the chain across the Golden Horn and the ships that bypassed it, the land-wall gates, and Hagia Sophia. Exact positions of some events are not recorded, so several pins are approximate.
On 18 June 1937 three Soviet airmen took off from Moscow in a single-engine plane and landed in Washington State more than 63 hours later, having flown over the North Pole. It was the first non-stop flight from the Soviet Union to the United States. The route follows the crew from the airfield near Shchyolkovo to the landing at Pearson Field, then to the general's table, the White House and the monument that still stands by the runway. The path over the Arctic is shown only as a symbolic pin.
At 21, Jack London sailed north in July 1897 to join the Klondike gold rush. He came home without gold but with scurvy and the stories that made his name: The Call of the Wild, "To Build a Fire" and more. This route follows him from the beach at Dyea over the Chilkoot Pass, down the lakes and rapids of the Yukon, through a winter at the Stewart River to Dawson City, where his cabin still stands.
Hemingway wrote his last great novella in Cuba, about a fisherman and one enormous marlin. The places around it are real: the hotel room where he first lived, the bar he loved, the house where he wrote, and the fishing village next door. This route follows the writer's Cuba from Old Havana to the harbour of Cojímar, where the Pilar was moored. The novella itself is under copyright, so the story is kept to its outline.
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm grew up poor, studied law, became librarians and gave the world its best-known fairy tales. Their lives and their stories run along one road across Germany. The route follows the Fairy Tale Route from Hanau, where they were born, through the places they lived and worked, to Sleeping Beauty's castle and the Pied Piper's Hamelin, ending in Bremen with the animals' statue. The tale places are traditional associations, not the Grimms' own claims.
Finland's national epic was gathered, not invented: a country doctor named Elias Lönnrot walked into the forests of Karelia and wrote down what the old singers recited. The route follows his collecting trips from 1832 to 1834, from Viena Karelia to his home at Kajaani and the first draft at Kuhmo, then visits three places the runes name: the Imatra rapids, the island of Saari and the Kemi river. The poem's geography is loose, so the last two pins are marked as guesses.
A few hundred Cossacks, a Stroganov fortress on the Kama and a khan's capital on the Irtysh: in four years Yermak turned a raid into the Russian entry into Siberia. The route follows the campaign from Orel-gorodok over the Urals to the battle at Chuvash Cape, the fall of Qashliq, Yermak's death at the Vagay and the founding of Tobolsk. Dates differ between chronicles and modern sources, and the sources mark the death site and the legends as uncertain; the notes at each stop say which.
In 1893 Fridtjof Nansen froze a purpose-built ship into the Arctic ice on purpose. His bet was that the pack would carry it across the top of the world, and the sceptics called it self-destruction. This route follows the voyage from Vardø to the pack ice, the drift, the sledge dash to 86°14′N, a hard winter in a stone hut and a lucky meeting at Cape Flora, ending at the museum where the ship rests. Ocean and ice stops have no map pin.
Bong Joon-ho's celebrated thriller follows the Kim family from a semi-basement flat to a rich family's villa, and the film's stairs make the class divide physical. The real shops, stairs and tunnel behind those scenes can still be walked across Seoul. The route runs from a corner store in Ahyeon-dong to the Jahamun Tunnel and the Goyang flood set. Both family homes were sets, so the houses themselves are not on the map.
In 1327 a Franciscan detective and his young novice arrive at a Benedictine abbey in northern Italy, and monks begin to die. Umberto Eco's abbey is invented, but it was assembled from real places, and Jean-Jacques Annaud's 1986 film built another one from sets and a German monastery. This route follows the borrowed pieces of the book, from the Sacra di San Michele to the portal at Moissac, then the places that played the abbey on screen. Pins for the book's models are traditional identifications, not locations named in the novel.
Cut off from the rest of the country, Leningrad lived through the winter of 1941–42 on 125 grams of bread a day, half of it sawdust. This route follows the siege through the places that carried the city through: a fortress island, an ice road, a seed bank, a diary, a symphony. It runs from the first day of the encirclement to the memorials that came after, and keeps to documented facts. Several stops are memorials: please visit with respect.
Before The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry flew the mail. He flew the Aéropostale line from Toulouse, ran the Cape Juby airfield, directed an airline in Buenos Aires and survived a crash in the Sahara that later fed his most famous book. The route follows his life in the air, from the take-off strip at Montaudran to the sea off Marseille where his plane was found. The Sahara crash site is only an educated guess.
Dante wrote the Divine Comedy while banished from Florence. This route follows both the man and the people he put in the poem who were real: Francesca, Ugolino and Pia. It runs from the Baptistery and the sentence of 1302, through the places tied to the poem's souls and the court of Verona, to Ravenna, where he died in 1321, and the empty tomb Florence built for him.
Two Dickens novels, one city of thieves' dens, prisons and cramped lodgings. Oliver Twist is dragged into Fagin's gang in the lanes of Holborn, while Pip of Great Expectations arrives from the Kent marshes expecting a soft white city and finds filth. The route follows Oliver and Nancy from Saffron Hill to London Bridge, Jacob's Island and Newgate, then Pip from Cooling churchyard through Rochester to Little Britain and Barnard's Inn. Several places are traditional models rather than named settings, and each pin says so.
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 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.
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.