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.
The journey south ran through Morocco first. For the third season the Atlantic ramparts of Essaouira stood in for Astapor, the slaver city where Daenerys buys an army of eunuch soldiers, and the earthen ksar of Aït Benhaddou stood in for Yunkai, whose two hundred thousand slaves she promises to free. When the story turned to Dorne, Spain answered: the Alcázar of Seville became the Water Gardens of House Martell, and the bullring at Osuna the fighting pits of Meereen.
Six stops in the order the episodes aired — two in Morocco, four in Spain. The last two are the biggest set-pieces of the sixth and seventh seasons: Girona's cathedral and steps as the Sept of Baelor, and the Roman ruins at Itálica as the ruined Dragonpit.
Tatooine is the Star Wars desert everyone knows, but the films kept finding other corners of the Earth for their galaxy: redwoods in northern California, a villa on Lake Como, a plaza in Seville, the desert around an oasis in Abu Dhabi, a monastery island off County Kerry and the largest salt flat in the world, in Bolivia.
This route follows the shooting in the order the films were made, from the Endor forest of Return of the Jedi to the Crait battle of The Last Jedi. Two stops mark an area rather than a spot: the Endor scenes were partly shot on private land, and no source names the stretch of desert that stood in for Jakku.
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.
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.
Claire, a twentieth-century nurse, touches a stone in a Highland circle and is carried back to 1743. A highlander knocks out the officer chasing her and takes her to his clan, and before long she is married to Jamie Fraser to keep her out of that officer's reach. Seven stops follow Claire through the first two seasons of Starz's Outlander.
They start near Kinloch Rannoch, where the production found its Craigh na Dun, then move to the real castles and villages playing Castle Leoch, Fort William, Cranesmuir and Lallybroch, and to a Fife castle standing in for a French abbey. The last stop is Culloden, the moor where Claire and Jamie say goodbye in the second-season finale.
One caveat: the standing stones on screen are a built set. The Bronze Age Clava Cairns near Inverness that fans often visit are said to have inspired them, but they are not where the circle was filmed.
Taki, a Tokyo schoolboy who waits tables in Shinjuku, keeps waking up in the body of Mitsuha, a shrine maiden in a mountain town who has never left it. They leave notes on each other's skin, fall for each other from a distance — and then the switching stops dead. Taki rides west with two friends to find the town he can only draw from memory, and finds it gone: a fragment of a comet took Itomori and five hundred people three years before his visit.
The town was invented, but the film stands on real ground: the Shinjuku where Taki lives and works, the Hida valley that lent Itomori its backdrop, the lake generally credited with the crater pool, and the stone staircase where the story ends. One caveat: Itomori was never filmed, so its crater is the one stop here without a pin.
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.
A student framed for an assault is put on probation, moves into a Tokyo neighbourhood that does not exist, and ends the school year as one of the Phantom Thieves. Persona 5 is set in modern-day Tokyo and uses real districts — Sangenjaya, Shibuya, Shinjuku and Akihabara — as its map, alongside the Metaverse where the Thieves enter Palaces.
This route picks five stops out of that year: Sojiro's Café Leblanc above Sangen-jaya Station, the Shibuya counter where the Thieves buy their equipment, Shinjuku's bar street and a fortune-teller's stand, the Akihabara arcade where a schoolboy holds a high score, and Odaiba, where the palace of Persona 5 Royal rises. Leblanc, the Crossroads Bar and the Gigolo Arcade are invented; the neighbourhoods around them are not.
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.
Los Santos feels like Los Angeles because it is Los Angeles, compressed. Grand Theft Auto V squeezes the city's most famous miles into one playable map, from a hillside sign to a Venice boardwalk.
This tour visits seven real stand-ins behind the fiction: the hillside sign, a movie palace, a luxury shopping street, an observatory, a pier, a beach and a towered folk-art park. Every pin marks the real place, and each stop names the game location it doubles for. Expect crowds at the beach and on Hollywood Boulevard, and quiet at the towers.
Greece, 431 BC: Athens and Sparta are tearing the Greek world apart, and you are a Spartan mercenary caught between them. Assassin's Creed Odyssey sends you across the Aegean with a broken spear and an eagle at your side, hunting your lost family and the masked Cult of Kosmos that destroyed it.
This route follows the Eagle Bearer's trail from the hot gates of Thermopylae to the oracle at Delphi, the Acropolis of Athens, the sanctuary at Olympia, warrior Sparta and finally Mount Taygetos. Every stop is a real place you can visit, recreated in the game's vast open world.
Sunja grows up in her mother's boarding house on Yeongdo, an island in the harbour of Busan, under Japanese rule. Pregnant by a married man, she marries a gentle minister instead and leaves with him for Osaka, where Koreans live poor and despised in a neighbourhood called Ikaino. The Apple TV+ series (2022–2024), based on Min Jin Lee's 2017 novel, follows four generations of her family from 1915 to 1989.
The route follows the family through real places in Korea and Japan, in story order. Homes, shops and offices in the series are fictional, so the pins mark the neighbourhoods and cities where the story is set, not filming locations.
Walter Mitty manages photo negatives at Life magazine in New York and escapes his dull days in elaborate daydreams. When the negative chosen for the last print cover goes missing, he has to track down its photographer, Sean O'Connell — to Greenland, Iceland and the Himalayas. Ben Stiller's 2013 film was shot on analog film, and almost all of its adventure was shot in Iceland.
This route starts at Life's real Manhattan home and then follows Walter through the Icelandic towns, harbour, mountain road, volcano and waterfall that stand in for Greenland and Afghanistan. The places are real; which country they play is not.
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.
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.
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.
In November 1274 a Mongol and Korean fleet landed on Tsushima, a mountainous Japanese island halfway to Korea, and overwhelmed its few defenders. Sucker Punch's 2020 game drops a fictional samurai, Jin Sakai, into that invasion: he survives the massacre on the beach and turns into "the Ghost", a guerrilla who breaks the samurai code to drive the invaders out.
The designers visited Tsushima twice but did not copy it one to one. This route visits the real places behind the game's opening battle, its castle and its shrines, most of them featured in the island's own guide for players. Jin, his clan and his battles are fiction; the landing, the fortress and the mountains are not.
The year is 2281, two centuries after a nuclear war. A courier carrying a mysterious platinum poker chip to New Vegas is shot in the head and left in a shallow grave — and survives. Obsidian's 2010 role-playing game follows the courier's hunt for the man who did it, into a war for the Mojave between the New California Republic, Caesar's slaver Legion and Mr. House, the hidden ruler of the Strip.
The designers built the map from US Geological Survey data and photographs of the real desert, so the game's road south from Goodsprings and back up to Las Vegas runs through real towns. The route follows that road. The towns' massacres, radiation and battles are fiction; their saloons, roller coasters and dam are not.
In April 1947 the Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl and five companions pushed off from Peru on a raft of nine balsa logs, built in the style of old Spanish drawings of South American rafts. They meant to prove that ancient people could have drifted from South America to Polynesia. After 101 days and almost 7,000 kilometres on the open Pacific, they crashed onto a coral reef in the Tuamotus — and all six walked ashore.
The voyage became a bestselling book and an Oscar-winning documentary. Heyerdahl's theory, though, has not survived: archaeology, language and genetics show that Polynesians came from the west, from Island Southeast Asia, as master navigators. The route follows the raft from Callao to Tahiti.
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 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 spring 1689 the poet Matsuo Bashō gave up his hut in Edo and set off on foot with his friend and disciple Kawai Sora into Oku, the remote north of Japan. For about 156 days and some 2,400 kilometres they walked to the places the old poets had made famous — a barrier gate, a bay of pine islands, a battlefield, a mountain temple — and Bashō answered them with haiku.
The travel diary he made of it, Oku no Hosomichi, published in 1702, is one of the classics of Japanese literature, and its stops are still pilgrimage sites. Bashō polished the facts for art; Sora's own diary shows where. Dates follow the old lunar calendar, so they are given here by season.
In October 1934 the Chinese Communists' main army, beaten by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists, broke out of its base in Jiangxi and fled west. A year and some 9,000 kilometres later, after river crossings under fire, snow passes and a high-altitude swamp, a few thousand survivors reached northern Shaanxi. On the way, Mao Zedong rose to lead the party, and the retreat became its founding legend.
The route follows the Central Red Army, the best-known of several Long March columns, in date order. Official histories have polished some episodes, and historians still argue about how much fighting there was at Luding Bridge; the texts note where accounts disagree. Most stops now have memorials and museums.
