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.
On 16 July 1969 a Saturn V lifted the Apollo 11 crew off a Florida launch pad; eight days later their capsule dropped into the Pacific. In between, the first people walked on another world while an estimated 600 million watched on Earth.
The route follows the mission through six stops: the launch pad in Florida, Mission Control in Houston, Tranquility Base on the Moon, the Australian dish that carried the moonwalk pictures, the splashdown and the capsule's museum home. The Moon stop has no pin because the map shows Earth only; its lunar coordinates are given in the text.
In December 1933, eighteen-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the Hook of Holland to walk to Constantinople, carrying a few clothes, some letters of introduction, an anthology of English verse and a volume of Horace. He slept in barns and shepherds' huts, but gentry and aristocracy kept inviting him into their country houses. He wrote the journey up decades later in A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water and The Broken Road.
The route follows him through ten places the sources let us pin, from the Hook and a Stuttgart apartment to Melk, Vienna, Prague, the bridge into Hungary, an island on the Danube that now lies under water, Plovdiv and Istanbul. Many pins are approximate: the sources name a town, not the exact spot where he stood.
A stranger who looks foreign joins two writers at Patriarch's Ponds, predicts a death, and Moscow's strangest spring begins. In Bulgakov's novel the devil, as Woland, visits Soviet Moscow with a retinue that includes the cat Behemoth and the henchman Azazello, while Margarita bargains with him for the Master.
The route follows the Moscow chapters in order: the ponds where it all starts, a writers' club, a haunted flat, a stage show, a flight of revenge, a ball, a terrace beside the Kremlin and a farewell on the Sparrow Hills. Several places are invented or only inspired by real ones, and each stop says which.
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.
Tom Ripley is paid $1,000 to travel to Italy and persuade Dickie Greenleaf to return to the United States. Claiming to be a former Princeton classmate, he slides into Dickie's life, and a friendship at the seaside turns into a trail of lies and killings.
The route follows the film's order through Ischia and Procida, Anzio, Naples, Rome and Venice. Many places play other places: Ischia and Procida stand in for the fictional village of Mongibello, Anzio plays San Remo, and the "Roman" opera house is in Naples.
A young bear stows away from Peru, turns up at Paddington station and is taken in by the Brown family. Paul King's 2014 film follows him through a cosy London of antique shops and a gentlemen's club, while a taxidermist closes in.
Most of it was shot on real London streets. This route runs from the station to Primrose Hill, Portobello Road, Pall Mall and the Natural History Museum, with one caveat: the film's station front door is borrowed from Marylebone.
Forza Horizon 5 drops the Horizon Festival into a fictionalised Mexico, on a map 50% larger than Forza Horizon 4's. Creative director Mike Brown calls Mexico almost the whole world in one country: snowy peaks, tropical jungles, epic canyons, beautiful beaches, ancient architecture and modern cities.
This route visits seven real places the game recreates, from a sea arch at the tip of Baja to a canyon with a train, and says what the game does at each. The map is a condensed Mexico, so the pins mark the real sites, not their positions in the game.
A schoolgirl in Kyushu follows a stranger into an abandoned resort, opens a door that was meant to stay shut, and ends up chasing a cat across Japan, closing doors as she goes. Her last door stands in the hometown she lost to the 2011 tsunami.
The route follows her path in story order: Nichinan harbour, the Bungo-Mori roundhouse, Yawatahama port, a Kobe mountain, Ochanomizu and Hijiri Bridge in Tokyo, then Miyako and Orikasa Station in Iwate. The film is animated, so most pins mark places that Wikipedia says its scenes were modelled on, and the Kobe amusement park is disputed.
Season 3 of The White Lotus follows wealthy guests and staff at a Thai wellness resort. It opens with gunshots and a body in a lake, then rewinds a week. Mike White wrote and directed all eight episodes, filmed from February to August 2024 in Bangkok, Phuket and Ko Samui.
This route visits six real places in story order, from the Four Seasons on Ko Samui to a Bangkok hotel and a Muay Thai stadium. The on-screen resort was stitched together from several hotels, so no single place is the White Lotus.
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.
In AD 79 a mountain above the Bay of Naples blew apart. Pliny the Younger watched from Misenum across the water, lost his uncle, the admiral Pliny the Elder, to the eruption, and years later described it for the historian Tacitus in two letters: the only eyewitness account that survives.
The route follows the eruption in the order of its events, from the mountain's first column to Pompeii, Herculaneum, the beach at Stabiae and back to Misenum. Pliny's letters never mention Pompeii or Herculaneum, so those stops come from archaeology. The traditional date is 24 August, but newer evidence points to the autumn.
King Arthur belongs to no single place. His story was built up by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Thomas Malory and many others, and this route follows it in the legend's own order: Merlin's dragons, Arthur's conception and coronation, his battles and court, the last fight, the sword in the water and Avalon.
Every pin marks a real place that tradition has attached to an episode, not a site proven by history, and each stop says where the link is doubted.
Netherfield Park is let at last, and Austen's novel follows Elizabeth Bennet from her family's village to a Kent parsonage and on to Derbyshire. The houses of the book are described rather than mapped, so this route follows the real places where the 2005 film and the 1995 BBC series found them.
Nine stops follow the story in order, from Longbourn to the inn at Lambton. Each pin is a real filming site standing in for a place in the book; only Gracechurch Street is the real London street the novel itself names.
Agatha Christie's 1937 mystery puts Hercule Poirot on holiday in Aswan, waiting to board the Nile steamer Karnak. Among his fellow passengers are a jilted woman stalking her ex-fiancé's honeymoon, her former friend the heiress, and a boulder that comes uncomfortably close to the bride.
The route follows the steamer from Aswan to Wadi Halfa and ends at Karnak, where the 1978 film moves the falling stone. The novel itself puts that scene at Abu Simbel.
In April 1625 an eighteen-year-old Gascon rides into the market town of Meung on a yellow pony, bound for Paris and the King's Musketeers. Dumas's novel follows D'Artagnan from that first quarrel through duels, a secret night in the Louvre, a bet made during a siege and a midnight ending on a river bank.
The route runs from the Loire to Paris, on to La Rochelle and Portsmouth, and back to the banks of the Lys. The streets, squares and palaces are real; most inns, houses and bastions are Dumas's, so several pins mark a town or a street rather than a building.
In 1754 a British gentleman, Haytham Kenway, kills a man at the opera in London and carries a stolen key to the American colonies. He is a Templar. His son, Connor, grows up to become the Assassin who hunts him across the American Revolution — through the Boston Massacre and the tea ships, the first shots at Lexington, Bunker Hill, Valley Forge, Monmouth and finally New York.
Assassin's Creed III builds its America from real maps, and almost every stop can still be walked: the opera house in Covent Garden, the Old State House and Boston Harbor, the green at Lexington and the bridge at Concord, the Bunker Hill battlefield, the Valley Forge encampment, the Monmouth battlefield, and the Battery at the foot of Manhattan, where the war ends.
Emily, a young marketing executive, is posted to Paris to give a French agency a social-media voice, and the show follows her across the city: the little square where she lives, her office by the Palais-Royal, a Left Bank café and the gardens and monuments she drifts through. In its fourth season the story reaches Rome, where Marcello shows her the Colosseum and the Trevi Fountain.
This route gathers the places that define Emily's Paris, from the Place de l'Estrapade — where her apartment faces Gabriel's restaurant across the square — to the Café de Flore, the Jardin du Luxembourg, the Palais Garnier, Montmartre's Sacré-Cœur and the French Open at Stade Roland Garros. It ends in Rome, at the two sights that seal her move to Italy.
In Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Ethan Hunt races a rogue artificial intelligence called the Entity for a two-piece key that can control it. The chase crosses the Empty Quarter, Abu Dhabi, Rome and Venice before a night train runs into the Alps and a bridge is blown.
Almost every stop is a real place: the desert and airport in the Emirates, a car chase through Rome, a party at the Doge's Palace, a cliff jump at Hellesylt in Norway, and the Alpine train sequence doubled on a Yorkshire heritage railway and in a Peak District quarry.
A CIA officer called the Protagonist joins Tenet, a secret organisation fighting a war across time. Inverted bullets and a Russian oligarch named Sator pull him from a Kyiv opera house to Mumbai, Oslo, the Amalfi Coast and Tallinn, chasing a device sent back from the future.
This route follows the film's real locations: Tallinn's Linnahall standing in for the Kyiv opera house, Colaba in Mumbai, the Oslo freeport sequence, the gardens of Villa Cimbrone above Amalfi, the Tallinn streets of the car chase and the California ghost town used for Stalsk-12. The Oslo Freeport and Stalsk-12 are fictional, so their pins mark the real places the film points to.
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.
Kalos is Metropolitan France turned into a star-shaped Pokémon region. Lumiose City is inspired by Paris, its Prism Tower by the Eiffel Tower and its art museum by the Louvre; the Battle Château recalls Chenonceau on the Loire, the palais Chaydeuvre is the château de Versailles, and the stones outside Geosenge Town are the Carnac stones. The games never confirm their models — these are fan and encyclopaedia identifications — so every pin on this route is speculative.
The route follows the story across the real France behind Kalos: the town where the adventure begins, Lumiose's iron tower, two châteaux and a royal palace, a coastal aquarium, the island tower where Mega Evolution is learned, the cathedral clock behind Anistar's sundial, the Breton megalith field where Team Flare hides its ultimate weapon, and an abandoned mine where the legendary Zygarde sleeps.
In 1868, at the onset of the Second Industrial Revolution, twin Assassins Jacob and Evie Frye come to a London controlled by the Templars under Crawford Starrick, and set out to take the city back: building their street gang, the Rooks, across an open world of seven Victorian boroughs. Jacob works through Starrick's lieutenants while Evie hunts a Piece of Eden, the Shroud, from St Paul's to the Tower to a vault under Buckingham Palace.
This route follows both threads across the capital, then jumps forward: to Whitechapel in 1888, where Evie hunts Jack the Ripper in the expansion, and to Tower Bridge in 1916, where Jacob's granddaughter Lydia clears a German spy nest at Churchill's request. Every stop is a real building or district you can walk to.
The BBC's Sherlock Holmes and his flatmate, army doctor John Watson, solve crimes in present-day London, from a killer's phone traced to their own doorstep to a dominatrix with compromising photographs and a criminal who cracks the Crown Jewels from his mobile. Six stops follow the first three series in order: the 221B front door on North Gower Street, the Baker Street museum, a summons to Buckingham Palace, Moriarty's Tower heist, the hospital rooftop finale and a bomb under Parliament.
Most stops are London landmarks you can see from the street; the 221B door is a private house, and the palace, Tower, hospital and Parliament appear as the show's story settings.
