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MoviesApproximate

Call Me by Your Name: From the Perlmans' Villa to the Serio Falls

In the summer of 1983 a seventeen-year-old boy and a twenty-four-year-old American share a house in rural Lombardy: Elio Perlman, who reads too much and plays the piano too well, and Oliver, the graduate student his father hired for the summer. One long, hot, awkward season, and neither of them handles it gracefully. It ends with a telephone call and a boy by a fireplace; it was shot, almost scene by scene, in real places you can still stand in. This route follows the filming from the Perlmans' villa at Moscazzano through Crema's piazza, a Roman villa on Lake Garda and a war memorial at Pandino, out to the meadow at Capralba where Elio makes his move, and then north for the last three days in Bergamo — the country's tallest waterfall, a pensione in the upper town, a drunken night outside Santa Maria Maggiore, and the small station south of Crema that stands in for Clusone. Principal photography ran from 9 May to the end of June 2016, and the villa is a private home, so a few stops are best seen from the street.

9 locations8/9 visitable

MoviesApproximate

The Godfather: From Staten Island to Sicily

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.

7 locations5/7 visitable

GamesFictional

Assassin's Creed Unity: Revolutionary Paris

Arno Dorian is a nobleman who walks into a trap: framed for the murder of the man who adopted him, he spends the opening hours of Unity's Paris of 1789 in a prison cell, and walks out of it an Assassin. From there he is off across the capital hunting the true powers behind the Revolution, while Napoleon, Robespierre and an Apple of Eden keep arriving before he can finish the job. Unity rebuilds late 18th-century Paris at roughly 1:1 scale across seven districts, plus Versailles, so almost every stop here is a building you can walk to: the Bastille site, the Assassins' hideout under the Île Saint-Louis, Notre-Dame's towers, the storming of the Tuileries, the execution square that is now the Place de la Concorde, Robespierre at the Hôtel de Ville, and — with the Dead Kings expansion — a Precursor temple under the basilica at Saint-Denis. Two stops are places the game invented rather than built: that hideout and that temple.

9 locations8/9 visitable

BooksApproximate

Three Men in a Boat: Kingston to Oxford

Jerome K. Jerome's 1889 comic novel sends three friends, J., George and Harris, and the dog Montmorency up the Thames in a rowing skiff, from Kingston to Oxford, camping out for a fortnight. What follows is one of the funniest books ever written about getting nowhere fast: a hedge maze with a guide who cannot find the exit, a punt run down at sunset, a dog who treats every cat as a personal enemy, and a provision-buying procession that staggers the whole town. The route follows the boat in the book's own order: Kingston's back streets, Hampton Court's maze, the lock opposite Weybridge where George joins them, the island where King John is said to have signed the Charter, tea below Cookham, a night in Marlow, Henley before the regatta, the old walls of Wallingford, and the difficult last mile into Oxford.

9 locations8/9 visitable

MoviesExact

In Bruges: A Hitman's Tour of Bruges

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.

8 locations7/8 visitable

MythologySpeculative

The Táin: Queen Medb's Raid on Cooley

One night at Cruachan, Queen Medb of Connacht and her husband Ailill compare their riches and find them equal in all but one thing: Ailill owns a magnificent white-horned bull. Medb sets out to take an even finer one, the Brown Bull of Cooley, from Ulster, whose warriors are all laid low by an ancient curse. Only the seventeen-year-old Cú Chulainn stands in her way, holding off her army ford by ford, one champion a day. The Táin Bó Cúailnge, "the Cattle Raid of Cooley", is the centrepiece of Ireland's Ulster Cycle, preserved in manuscripts from the 12th century on. Its storytellers loved explaining place-names, and many of its places are real and visitable. This route follows the raid from Connacht to Cooley and the bull's last journey home. Quotations are from Joseph Dunn's 1914 translation.

5 locations5/5 visitable

MythologySpeculative

The Mahabharata: The Pandavas' Road to Kurukshetra

Two branches of one royal family, the five Pandava brothers and their hundred Kaurava cousins, quarrel over the throne of the Kuru kingdom. The Pandavas survive a murder plot, win the princess Draupadi, build a splendid capital, lose everything in a rigged game of dice and spend thirteen years in exile before the families meet in an eighteen-day war at Kurukshetra. The Sanskrit epic, one of the longest poems ever composed, also holds the Bhagavad Gita. Northern India is dotted with places that tradition links to the story, several of them with real Iron Age remains. This route follows the Pandavas through those traditional sites. They are identifications of faith and local memory; archaeology has found ancient towns, but not the epic's events.

6 locations6/6 visitable

GamesApproximate

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: Around the World in 1937

1937, between Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade. A giant breaks into Marshall College, steals a mummified cat and knocks out Indiana Jones. The trail leads Indy to a "Great Circle" of sacred sites spaced evenly around the globe, and into a race against the Nazi archaeologist Emmerich Voss to unlock its power. Todd Howard conceived the story of MachineGames' 2024 game, and its director pictured it as a "lost Indiana Jones adventure from the 1980s". The circle and its secret are pure adventure fiction, but its stops are real: the Vatican, Giza, wartime Shanghai, the ruined Thai capital of Sukhothai and the ziggurat of Ur. The designers rebuilt them from books and photographs as they would have looked in the 1930s. This route follows the main story.

6 locations3/6 visitable

GamesApproximate

Assassin's Creed Origins: Bayek's Egypt

Egypt, 49 BC. Bayek, the last Medjay protector of the Siwa Oasis, loses his son to a band of masked men, and his hunt for them leads him into the war between Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy XIII, and to the arrival of Julius Caesar. Ubisoft's 2017 game ends with Bayek and his wife Aya founding the secret brotherhood that the whole series grows from. The studio worked with Egyptologists and historians, enlarged cities for a sense of "pharaonic scale", and later added a combat-free Discovery Tour. This route follows the main story through the real places it uses, from the oracle at Siwa to the spot in Rome where Caesar died. Bayek and the secret orders are fiction; the queen, the generals and the murders mostly are not.

7 locations5/7 visitable

GamesApproximate

Kingdom Come: Deliverance — Medieval Bohemia in Real Life

Bohemia, 1403. King Wenceslaus IV has been kidnapped by his half-brother Sigismund, whose mercenaries burn the silver-mining village of Skalitz. Henry, the blacksmith's son, survives, and the rest of the 2018 role-playing game by Prague's Warhorse Studios follows his hunt for justice and his father's sword across a small stretch of the Sázava valley in Central Bohemia. Almost every place in the game is real and still on the map: Stříbrná Skalice, the ruins of Talmberk, the town of Rataje with its castle Pirkštejn, the monastery at Sázava. Many of the lords Henry serves were real people too. The route follows the main story; the sequel's opening at Trosky closes it.

7 locations5/7 visitable

HistoryExact

The Boshin War: Kyoto to Hakodate

In January 1868 Japan's young emperor was declared ruler in fact as well as name, ending more than 250 years of Tokugawa shogunate. The last shogun's supporters did not give up quietly. For eighteen months a civil war rolled north from the edge of Kyoto to Edo, into the mountains of Aizu and finally to a star-shaped fortress on Hokkaido, where a short-lived breakaway republic made its last stand. The route follows that war in six places, all of them visitable: the battlefield at Toba, Edo Castle, the hill of Ueno, Aizu's castle and the hill where its teenage soldiers died, and Goryōkaku. Dates are given in the Western calendar, converted from the Japanese lunar dates used at the time.

6 locations6/6 visitable

GamesApproximate

The Oregon Trail: The Game and the Real Trail

Three student teachers in Minneapolis wrote The Oregon Trail in two weeks in 1971 for a history class. Its 1985 Apple II version, set in 1848, became a staple of American classrooms — buying oxen, fording rivers, hunting buffalo and, all too often, dying of dysentery — and the series has sold more than 65 million copies. The game was built around real landmarks of the real trail, a 2,170-mile wagon route that some 400,000 emigrants travelled to Oregon and California, mostly between 1846 and 1869, across the homelands of many Native nations. The route follows the game's stops from Missouri to the Willamette Valley, with what stands at each place today.

8 locations8/8 visitable