A famous American actress walks into a Notting Hill travel bookshop, and its shy owner falls for her: that is the whole of Notting Hill, and somehow it is enough. Hugh Grant stammers, Julia Roberts glows, and London plays itself, from the market street of Portobello Road to a midnight garden and a press conference at the Savoy.
The route follows the film in story order, from the bookshop at 142 Portobello Road and the blue door at 280 Westbourne Park Road to the Ritz, a birthday party, the private garden, the Henry James set at Kenwood House and the Savoy finale. The flat interiors were studio sets and the garden is private, so some pins are for looking rather than entering.
The 1965 film of Maria von Trapp's life was shot on real locations around Salzburg between March and September 1964, and almost all of them can still be visited. This route follows Maria from the mountain meadow and her abbey through the fountains and gardens of the song sequences to the villa terrace, the wedding church and the festival hall where the family sings its way to freedom.
The stops run in story order, from the Bavarian opening to the festival escape. One caveat: the famous cemetery hiding place never existed; it was a Hollywood studio set modelled on St Peter's Graveyard.
Jurassic Park (1993) invents a dinosaur theme park on an island that does not exist, then shoots almost all of it on one small Hawaiian island, Kauaʻi. On 11 September 1992, the last scheduled day of the Kauaʻi shoot, Hurricane Iniki passed directly over the island and pushed one famous sequence to a ranch on Oʻahu.
Nine stops follow the film in story order: the garden of the opening attack, the stream that played a Dominican amber mine, the Kapaʻa waterfront that played a Costa Rica café, the falls every visitor flies past, the estate where the visitor centre façade stood, the gates below Mount Waiʻaleʻale, the canyon of the dead fence, the Gallimimus stampede at Kualoa Ranch and the garden where Grant finds the nest. Filming on Kauaʻi began on 24 August 1992.
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.
The pope is dead, four cardinals have been kidnapped, and a missing vial of antimatter will destroy the Vatican at midnight. The American symbologist Robert Langdon is called in and reads the threat as a path: four altars of the "Path of Illumination", tied to the classical elements, where a cardinal will die each hour from 8 p.m. With Vittoria Vetra, a CERN scientist, he races the clock across Rome — from a Pantheon they wrongly believe holds the first answer to a fountain where a cardinal is being drowned.
This route follows Ron Howard's 2009 film rather than Dan Brown's novel: the Pantheon and Raphael's tomb, the Chigi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, the obelisk in St Peter's Square, Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, the Fountain of the Four Rivers, the assassin's lair at Castel Sant'Angelo, and the midnight finale beneath St Peter's. All of it still stands; the caveat is that Rome's diocese refused the crew access to the churches, so several interiors in the film are studio sets.
Much of Game of Thrones' North was filmed in Northern Ireland. Winterfell, its godswood, Castle Black, the Kingsroad and a fishing harbour that played Pyke were all real ground dressed as Westeros, and a basalt hillside above a small Antrim village hosts the first execution of the series.
The route runs in the order the episodes aired: the deserter's beheading above Cairncastle and the Winterfell of Castle Ward, then the quarry that held Castle Black and the Wall, the godswood, the Kingsroad beech avenue and the harbour where Theon Greyjoy comes home. The last stop is the Moneyglass estate, where a bigger Winterfell was built for the second season and used again for the eighth season's battle. Almost everything here is exterior: Winterfell's great hall was a soundstage set.
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.
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.
Before Hogwarts there is London: a market alley off Gracechurch Street, a barrier between platforms, a staircase in Oxford, a castle in Northumberland and a steam train crossing a Highland viaduct. This route visits six real places that built the Harry Potter films, shot from September 2000 to March 2001 and returned to in the sequels.
You start where Harry buys his school supplies, run through the wall at King's Cross, climb the stairs down which McGonagall comes to meet him, wake in the hospital wing, take your first flying lesson at Alnwick and ride out over Glenfinnan — six real places, each tied to the scene it created.
In March 1976 a film crew came to southern Tunisia and turned it into another planet. George Lucas had selected Tunisia to provide the desert planet setting for Star Wars, and filming in Tunisia began on March 22, 1976: a troglodyte hotel became the Lars homestead, the salt flats became a moisture farm, and the streets of Ajim on Djerba became the Mos Eisley spaceport.
When the prequels called, the crews came back: locations at Onk Jemal in Tozeur, Ksar Ouled Soltane and Ksar Hadada were used for Tatooine scenes in the 1998 shoot, from the Boonta Eve podrace track to the slave quarters where the boy Anakin lived. Abandoned sets for the filming have been left in the desert but can be visited — this route links all eight sites, from the droids' landing dunes to the granary-courtyard slave quarters.
In about 1986 a boy of five or six fell asleep on an empty train in central India and woke up nearly 1,500 kilometres away in Calcutta, unable to name his home town. Adopted by a couple in Tasmania, Saroo Brierley found his way back 25 years later by tracing railway lines on Google Earth. His memoir A Long Way Home became the 2016 film Lion, with Dev Patel as the grown-up Saroo and Nicole Kidman as his adoptive mother.
The route follows the real journey, which the film tells closely, from Khandwa station to Burhanpur, Howrah and Hobart, and back to Khandwa. Family homes are private and not pinned.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In January 1952 Ernesto Guevara, a 23-year-old medical student from Buenos Aires, and his friend Alberto Granado, a 29-year-old biochemist, set off to cross South America on an old 1939 Norton 500 they called La Poderosa, "The Mighty One". The bike died in Chile, and they went on by truck, steamer, raft, horse and on foot — some 8,000 kilometres in about nine months, ending at a leper colony on the Amazon and in Caracas.
Guevara's diary of the trip, published decades later as The Motorcycle Diaries, records how poverty, exploited miners and the lepers they worked with changed him; within a few years he was "Che", a leader of the Cuban Revolution. The route follows the journey from both men's accounts as summarised by historians.
In December 1831 a 22-year-old Cambridge graduate with a passion for beetles and rocks sailed from Plymouth as an unpaid naturalist on HMS Beagle, a ten-gun survey brig. The voyage was meant to take two years and took five. Charles Darwin came home with crates of fossils, skins and notebooks — and with questions about the islands that would lead him, two decades later, to On the Origin of Species.
The route follows the ship around the world in order, using Darwin's own Journal of Researches for dates and details: the volcanic Cape Verde islands, the Brazilian forest, the fossil beds of Argentina, Tierra del Fuego, a great Chilean earthquake, the Galápagos, Cape Town and home to Falmouth.
Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love at secondary school in Lagos, in a Nigeria under military rule where everyone seems to be planning to leave. She gets a scholarship to Philadelphia; he, refused an American visa after 9/11, ends up working illegally in London. Over thirteen years in the United States Ifemelu discovers that she has become "black" — and writes a hit blog about it — before deciding to go home.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2013 novel moves between real cities on three continents, and the route follows it in story order rather than in the book's flashback structure. Homes, salons and the university in Philadelphia are not identified, so most pins mark the city or campus.
A young English solicitor travels to the Carpathians to sell a London house to a nobleman — and becomes his prisoner. The Count then ships himself to England in fifty boxes of earth, comes ashore in a Yorkshire storm and starts hunting in London, until a small band led by Professor Van Helsing chases him all the way back to his mountains.
Stoker never visited Transylvania; he built its geography from books and maps, and the English half from places he knew. The route follows the novel's diaries and letters stop by stop: the inn at Bistritz, the Borgo Pass, the Black Sea port of Varna, the harbour, steps and churchyard of Whitby, Purfleet on the Thames, London Zoo and the final race up the Danube at Galatz.
On 16 June 1994 an American, Jesse, and a French student, Céline, meet on a train from Budapest. He talks her into getting off with him in Vienna, and with no money for a hotel they walk the city all night, talking about love, death and everything else until his flight leaves in the morning. Richard Linklater's 1995 film was shot entirely in Vienna and began a trilogy that continued in Before Sunset and Before Midnight.
The film strings its locations together as if they were a single walk; in reality they are scattered across the city, from the outer districts to the Danube. This route visits them in the order of the night.
On the evening of 2 October 1872, the punctual and unflappable Phileas Fogg bets his fellow members of the Reform Club £20,000 — half his fortune — that he can go around the world in eighty days, and leaves that same night with his new French valet, Passepartout. On his heels comes Detective Fix, convinced that Fogg is a bank robber on the run. Jules Verne's novel appeared in 1872, when the opening of the Suez Canal and new railways across India and America had made such a race against the timetable just about possible.
The route follows the journey eastward in the novel's own dates, from Pall Mall back to Pall Mall.
In 1888 Nellie Bly, the star reporter of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, proposed turning Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days into fact. On 14 November 1889, with two days' notice and as little luggage as she could manage, she sailed from Hoboken to beat Phileas Fogg's fictional record. She came home 72 days, 6 hours and 11 minutes later, a world record — briefly — and a celebrity, while the World's readers guessed her arrival time to the second.
The route follows her book of 1890, stop by stop, with the dates from her own record. She went east by steamer and train, through the Suez Canal and the British ports of Asia.
The Supreme Court had ruled that segregated waiting rooms and lunch counters in terminals serving interstate buses were illegal, but across the Deep South the "whites only" signs stayed up. On 4 May 1961 thirteen volunteers of the Congress of Racial Equality, black and white together, set out from Washington, D.C., on two buses to test the ruling all the way to New Orleans. In Alabama they were met by mobs, a burning bus and police who looked away; hundreds more riders followed them into the jails of Mississippi.
The route follows the rides through the places where it happened, several of them now museums and part of a National Monument.
Before the Minotaur, there was the road. Theseus grew up in Troezen, never knowing his father; when he was old enough to lift a great stone and take the sword and sandals hidden beneath it, he set out to find him in Athens. The safe way was by sea. He chose the coast road round the Saronic Gulf instead, which was infested with bandits, and dealt with each one in the way they had treated travellers.
The route follows the six labours of that journey as Plutarch tells them in his Life of Theseus, written around AD 100 from much older tales. The places are real; the giants and robbers belong to myth, and several sites are traditional guesses.
