Ezio Auditore da Firenze comes to Constantinople in 1511, an old Assassin chasing five keys that unlock a library sealed beneath Masyaf by Altaïr two and a half centuries earlier. The keys lie scattered across an Ottoman capital caught between the succession claims of the princes Ahmet and Selim, with Byzantine Templars working against the city; the search runs from the Galata Tower and Hagia Sophia to the palace at Topkapı, out to the Maiden's Tower in the Bosphorus and, at the end, into a stronghold of the Byzantine Templars under Cappadocia.
This route starts at Masyaf in Syria and follows Ezio through the real Istanbul of the game, the tower, church, palace and islet that can still be visited, before ending underground in Cappadocia.
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.
James Joyce's Ulysses is one ordinary day, 16 June 1904, in Dublin, told in eighteen episodes through Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertisement canvasser, and Stephen Dedalus, who starts the day in a tower by the sea. This route walks the day in the order the novel runs it: from the Martello tower at Sandycove where it opens to Howth Head, where Molly Bloom's memory ends it with a yes.
Almost every stop is a place you can still stand in: the tower where Joyce stayed in 1904, the strand Stephen walks, the street of the chemist's where Bloom buys soap, the cemetery of the funeral, the pub where he eats his sandwich, the library where he passes between Stephen and Mulligan, the quay of the Ormond Hotel and the maternity hospital. The last stop is a recollection rather than a setting: the novel never says where on Howth Head the two of them lay.
Bond is shot off a train in Turkey and left for dead, while a former agent with a grudge against M attacks MI6 from within. Sam Mendes's 2012 film — the 23rd Bond and the highest-grossing of them all — was shot between November 2011 and May 2012 in London, Turkey and Scotland, with much of "Shanghai" and "Macau" faked in England.
The route follows the story from the rooftops of the Grand Bazaar to the railway viaduct where Bond falls, a beach bar in Fethiye, MI6's real headquarters, a Turner in the National Gallery, an abandoned Japanese island, a disused Tube platform and the glen where Bond takes M home. Skyfall Lodge itself was a set in Surrey.
King Pelias sends his nephew Jason to fetch the Golden Fleece from Colchis, at the far end of the Black Sea, hoping he will never come back. Jason builds the Argo, gathers the greatest heroes of his day, Heracles among them, and sails east. Apollonius of Rhodes told the voyage in his Argonautica in the 3rd century BC, and he filled it with real coasts, harbours and local legends.
This route follows the outward voyage to Colchis. The way home is left out: ancient writers sent the Argo back by wildly different routes, up rivers into the Adriatic and even across Libya. The heroes and the fleece are myth; the shores, islands and ancient cities are real. Quotations are from R. C. Seaton's 1912 translation.
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.
Xuanzang's search for the original Buddhist scriptures runs from Chang'an across the Taklamakan's edge, the Tian Shan and the Hindu Kush to the Buddhas of Bamiyan, then on to Taxila, Kashmir and Nalanda. The monk left in 629 despite a Tang ban on foreign travel, and his record inspired Journey to the West.
His travel record, the Great Tang Records on the Western Regions, is still a key source for the history of Central Asia and India, and his journey inspired the classic novel Journey to the West. The route follows him there and back. There are no travel tips for Afghanistan.
In 1977 Robyn Davidson, then in her twenties, walked about 2,700 kilometres from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean with four camels and her dog, crossing some of the emptiest desert on earth. She had spent two years in Alice Springs learning to train wild camels. She had no plan to write about it, but a National Geographic article and photographs by Rick Smolan made her famous, and her 1980 book Tracks became a classic, filmed in 2013.
The route follows her line west across the Northern Territory and Western Australia in order. Much of it crosses Aboriginal land, where she travelled with a Pitjantjatjara elder, Mr Eddie; pins mark communities and stations, not sacred sites.
In November 1095 Pope Urban II, answering a Byzantine emperor's plea for help against the Seljuk Turks, called western Christians to an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Tens of thousands answered — knights, foot soldiers and poor pilgrims. Their armies took separate roads to Constantinople, then marched together across Anatolia and Syria. Almost four years after the call, they stormed Jerusalem and massacred much of its population.
The route follows the main armies in order, from Clermont to Jerusalem, using the participants' own chronicles as summarised by modern historians. Violence against Jews in the Rhineland and against the people of the cities on the way is part of the story and is named plainly. There are no travel tips for Syria or the Lebanese border area.
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.
After ten years at Troy, Odysseus sets sail for his island home of Ithaca and takes another ten to get there: blown off course, he meets a man-eating Cyclops, a witch who turns his crew into pigs, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis and a nymph who will not let him go, losing every ship and every companion on the way. Homer's Odyssey, composed around the late 8th century BC, has been read as a map for as long as it has been read.
Already in antiquity the poem's places were linked to real coasts, mostly around Sicily and southern Italy. Those identifications are traditions, not facts, and the ancient geographer Eratosthenes doubted them all — so most pins here are marked speculative.
Alexander the Great's route runs from Troy and the Granicus in Turkey to Tyre, Alexandria and Persepolis, and on to the Jhelum in the Punjab. He crossed into Asia at 22, and eleven years later died in Babylon at 32, his empire stretching from Greece to India.
The route follows the campaign through its turning points, with Arrian's Anabasis, written four centuries later from earlier accounts, as the main guide. Several battlefields can only be placed approximately; their pins are marked as such.
