Forza Horizon 4, released on 2 October 2018, turns Great Britain into one giant racetrack: an open world with condensed representations of Edinburgh, the Scottish Highlands, the Lake District and the Cotswolds, where seasons change every week and Derwentwater freezes hard enough to drive across. Microsoft counted 24 million players by November 2020, and Polygon found the game world a theme-park version of England where everything has "the faint whiff of an idealised 1950s about it, a place of ordered pub gardens and rosebushes".
This route drives the real Britain behind the game, north to south: Edinburgh's Old Town, Bamburgh Castle on its coastal crag, three Lake District stops at Derwentwater, Ambleside and Tarn Hows, and the honey-coloured village of Broadway in the Cotswolds. Every stop can be visited today.
The Galar region is Britain played back as a game: a fictional land inspired by the United Kingdom, dotted with landmarks that recall Bath and York, crowned by a London of clock towers and football-stadium gyms. Eight gym cities, eight badges, and then the Champion's Cup in Wyndon, where Leon waits and the Darkest Day breaks.
This route walks the real Britain behind that map, south to north and then beyond: a chalk giant, a lighthouse, Roman baths, a minster, a national stadium and a clock tower, plus the two downloadable lands, the Isle of Man and the snows of Scotland. Every identification is a fan or developer reading, never confirmed in the games, so every pin here is speculative.
Daniel Craig's first Bond bleeds, loses at cards and gets his boss a dressing-down, and the film's geography plays tricks of its own: Montenegro is a Czech spa town, Madagascar is an abandoned building site in Nassau, and the House of Commons is a monastery library in Prague.
The route follows the film from the black-and-white opening in a Prague office block to the digger chase on a Bahamian building site, a Paradise Island resort, the casino and hotel of Karlovy Vary, the Lake Como villa where Bond recovers from poison, the Venetian palazzo that sinks with Vesper inside, and the Lake Como house where Bond finally gives his name. Two stops are hotels and one is a monastery library you can walk into; the digger site is now inside a military base.
After a first season in Malta, the show crossed the Adriatic to a walled city. Dubrovnik's two-kilometre ramparts, the fortress above its western gate and its late-medieval streets played King's Landing for everything the effects departments could not invent: the name-day combats, the riot at the gate, Cersei's walk of atonement.
Eight stops run in the order the episodes aired — Lovrijenac and the Pile Gate in the second season, the Rector's Palace when Dubrovnik doubled as Qarth, the Red Keep's gardens at Trsteno and the Meereen stand-in at Klis in the third and fourth, and the Jesuit stairs where the fifth-season finale was shot in October 2014. Only the exteriors live here: the Red Keep and the Sept of Baelor were computer-generated.
Michael Corleone brings his girlfriend Kay to his sister Connie's wedding at the family compound — and is pulled into a war that ends with him shooting Sollozzo and McCluskey, hiding out in Sicily, losing his Sicilian bride to a car bomb, and settling every score during his nephew's baptism.
Coppola shot the film on real locations around New York City and Sicily: the Staten Island house that played the compound, the Mott Street block of the Genco Olive Oil front, the villages of Savoca and Forza d'Agrò that play Corleone, the bar and church of Michael's courtship, the villa of the bombing, and the Little Italy cathedral of the baptism climax.
Crown Princess Ann, on a goodwill tour of Rome, slips out of her embassy for one night of ordinary life. Reporter Joe Bradley finds her asleep in the street, recognises her from a newspaper photograph, and secretly guides her through the city to land an exclusive — a day of ice cream, a Vespa and the Mouth of Truth that turns into something neither of them planned.
William Wyler's 1953 comedy was shot almost entirely in Rome. The route follows Ann and Joe through the real locations: the palace that played the embassy, Joe's flat on Via Margutta, the Trevi and the barber by the Spanish Steps, the Colosseum, the Bocca della Verità, the riverside dance beside Castel Sant'Angelo and the closing press conference at Palazzo Colonna.
After a job goes horribly wrong in London, two Irish hitmen are ordered to lie low in Bruges and wait for a phone call. Ken finds the city beautiful; Ray is bored rigid and says so at every turn. Martin McDonagh's 2008 dark comedy was shot entirely on location in the city in February and March 2007.
This route follows Ken and Ray through the medieval centre: their hotel, the Belfry, a church with a relic, Bosch's vision of hell in the Groeninge Museum, a park, the Lake of Love and the street where the story ends. One scene was shot in a stand-in church, and the top of the tower was a studio set.
Troy has fallen. Aeneas, a Trojan prince, carries his old father out of the burning city and sets sail with the survivors to find the new homeland the gods have promised them. Virgil's Aeneid, written for Augustus in the 20s BC, follows years of wrong turns, storms and prophecies until the exiles land in Italy, where their descendants will one day found Rome.
This route follows the voyage in the order it happens, which is not the order Virgil tells it: the poem opens in Carthage and lets Aeneas recount the earlier wanderings to Queen Dido. Every stop is a real ancient site, most now open as archaeological parks; Aeneas himself belongs to legend. Quotations are from John Dryden's 1697 translation.
In June 1325 a 21-year-old law student left Tangier to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. He did not come home for 24 years. Ibn Battuta crossed the Islamic world and beyond — Arabia, East Africa, Anatolia, Central Asia, India, the Maldives, Sumatra and China — earning his keep as a judge and a guest of sultans, marrying and divorcing along the way. By some estimates he covered about 117,000 kilometres, more than any traveller before the age of steam.
Back in Morocco he dictated his memories, the Rihla, to a scholar who polished them and borrowed passages from older books, so not every scene was his own. The route picks out nine stops in the order he reached them; it is not one continuous road. There are no travel tips for Mecca or Mali.
In 1324 Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire, set out on the pilgrimage to Mecca with a caravan so rich in gold that Cairo talked about it for years. Arab chroniclers wrote of thousands of servants carrying gold bars and camels loaded with gold dust; historians today treat those numbers as a way of saying "more than anyone could imagine", not as a count. The Catalan Atlas of 1375 still shows him enthroned in the Sahara, holding up a piece of gold.
The route keeps to the places the sources actually record: the royal city of Mali, the camp below the pyramids, Cairo, Mecca, and Gao and Timbuktu on the way home. The road across the desert is not documented, so it is not drawn. The route offers no travel advice for Mali.
Barcelona, 1945. A bookseller leads his ten-year-old son Daniel through a dark alley off the Ramblas to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a secret library where every child may adopt one book. Daniel chooses a novel by Julián Carax — and discovers that someone has spent years hunting down and burning every other copy.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón's 2001 bestseller is a love letter to the old city, and its mystery runs through real streets: the Ramblas, the Gothic Quarter, the Ribera, Tibidabo and Montjuïc. The library, the bookshop, the hospice and the Aldaya mansion are invented, so those pins mark the streets where Zafón put them; the café, squares and castle are real and open to visitors.
Florence, 1476: young Ezio Auditore watches his father and brothers hanged on false charges, and spends the next quarter-century hunting the men responsible across Tuscany, Romagna and Venice, all the way to the Vatican. Ubisoft's 2009 game rebuilt Renaissance Italy for climbing and running across rooftops, and mixed its invented feud between Assassins and Templars with real people — the Medici and Pazzi, Leonardo da Vinci, Caterina Sforza and the Borgia pope.
The route visits the real buildings and towns of the game. The Auditore family and their villa are fictional; most of the events around them are invented or rearranged from history.
