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.
Bond's final outing opens beside a lake in Norway and closes on an island in the Faroe Islands, with a long detour through southern Italy and a retirement in Jamaica in between. The story's geography is real: Matera's cave lanes, a bridge over the Gravina gorge, a railway station at Sapri, a waterfront house at Port Antonio, the Atlantic Ocean Road and the cliffs of Kalsoy.
The route follows the film's order — the frozen-lake flashback, the grave and the bridge, the Matera car chase, the farewell at Sapri, five quiet years in Jamaica and the 'Cuban' harbour that is really Port Antonio, then the Norway drive and the villain's island in the Faroe Islands. The beach house in Jamaica and the lake house in Norway were sets, both since dismantled.
The Galar region is Britain played back as a game: a fictional land inspired by the United Kingdom, dotted with landmarks that recall Bath and York, crowned by a London of clock towers and football-stadium gyms. Eight gym cities, eight badges, and then the Champion's Cup in Wyndon, where Leon waits and the Darkest Day breaks.
This route walks the real Britain behind that map, south to north and then beyond: a chalk giant, a lighthouse, Roman baths, a minster, a national stadium and a clock tower, plus the two downloadable lands, the Isle of Man and the snows of Scotland. Every identification is a fan or developer reading, never confirmed in the games, so every pin here is speculative.
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.
A chance meeting at the Criterion Bar sends an army doctor just back from Afghanistan to a laboratory at St Bartholomew's Hospital, where a stranger grips his hand and observes: "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive." Within days Dr Watson has moved into 221B Baker Street, the address where many of the stories begin, and off runs the canon: four novels and 56 short stories, all but one set between 1880 and 1914.
This route walks Holmes's London in the order the stories appeared: the Criterion where Watson met Stamford, the hospital of the famous first deduction, the Baker Street rooms that did not exist when Doyle wrote and are now a museum, Scotland Yard's Victorian headquarters on the Embankment, a society church where a bride vanishes, a silent club on Pall Mall, and the Underground station where a body fell from a train roof.
Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag sets its pirate Caribbean in Havana, Nassau, Kingston and Port Royal. Edward Kenway steals a dead Assassin's name, takes the Jackdaw, builds a brotherhood in Nassau, loses his friends and chases the Observatory, a device that can watch anyone on earth.
Black Flag sets all of it in real ports — Havana, Nassau, Kingston, Port Royal — and then leaves the Caribbean for the Maya ruins of Tulum, an island in the Gulf of Guinea and a final scene in London. The route follows Edward from the harbour where Torres's plot starts, through the pirate republic and the governor who ends it, to the Kingston house where Mary Read drops the disguise, the jail at Port Royal, Príncipe, where the Sage is waiting, and Covent Garden. Most stops mark a real landmark in the town the game rebuilds.
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.
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.
Outlander's Scotland: the standing stones of Craigh na Dun near Kinloch Rannoch, Doune as Castle Leoch, Culross as Cranesmuir and Culloden moor. Claire, a twentieth-century nurse, touches a stone and wakes in 1743; a highlander knocks out the officer chasing her, and she marries Jamie Fraser to stay out of his reach.
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.
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.
A jazz pianist and an aspiring actress argue through the windows of their cars in a Los Angeles traffic jam, and the city itself becomes the romance: a night on a funicular, a broken projector, a kiss in a planetarium. Damien Chazelle shot La La Land in 40 days across Los Angeles in the summer of 2015, and most of the places the couple reaches for are still there.
This route follows Mia and Sebastian from the freeway ramps where they shout at each other to the jazz bar Seb finally gets to open — the 105/110 connector ramps, the Burbank café on the Warner lot, the Lighthouse Café and the pier beside it, the Rialto in South Pasadena, Griffith Observatory and Angels Flight. The film rarely names its own locations, so a few pins mark the real building that stood in for the one on screen.
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.
The Godfather was filmed on Staten Island, on Mott Street and in Sicily, where Savoca and Forza d'Agrò play Corleone. Michael is pulled into the family war, flees to Sicily, loses Apollonia to a car bomb and settles 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.
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 smuggler named Joel is hired to carry fourteen-year-old Ellie — possibly immune to the fungus that ended the world — across a ruined America, from the Boston quarantine zone to a hospital in Salt Lake City. What starts as a delivery job becomes the closest thing either of them has left to family, ending in a hospital corridor with an impossible choice.
This route follows their road west in story order: outbreak night in Austin, the Boston handoff, Bill's trapped town, the Pittsburgh ambush, Tommy's dam settlement at Jackson, the deserted university in Colorado and the Salt Lake City hospital. The cities are real but the story sites are placed approximately, with real landmarks as pins.
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.
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.
Tradition links the Mahabharata to northern India: the Kuru court at Hastinapur near Meerut, Kampil for Draupadi's contest, Delhi's Purana Qila as Indraprastha, and Jyotisar, where Krishna speaks the Bhagavad Gita. The five Pandava brothers survive a murder plot, lose everything in a rigged dice game and meet their hundred cousins in an eighteen-day war at Kurukshetra.
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.
On the eve of his coronation, Prince Rama of Ayodhya is sent into the forest for fourteen years, so that his stepmother's son can rule. His wife Sita and brother Lakshmana go with him. In the forest Sita is carried off by Ravana, the demon king of Lanka, and Rama, helped by Hanuman and an army of vanaras, monkey-like forest people, crosses the sea to win her back. The Sanskrit epic attributed to Valmiki runs to some 24,000 verses and is still retold, staged and worshipped across South and Southeast Asia.
For centuries pilgrims have tied its episodes to real places, from Ayodhya to the hills of Sri Lanka. This route follows those traditional identifications, which are matters of faith and local memory rather than archaeology. Most of the stops are living temples.
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.
Fallout: New Vegas rebuilds the real Mojave: Goodsprings, Primm, Nipton, Searchlight, Boulder City and Hoover Dam are all on its map. In 2281 a courier carrying a platinum poker chip is shot and left in a shallow grave, survives and hunts the man who did it, into a war for the desert between the New California Republic, Caesar's Legion and Mr. House.
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 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.
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.
On 12 March 1930 Mahatma Gandhi, aged 60, walked out of his ashram in Ahmedabad with 78 followers, heading for the sea. His target was the British monopoly on salt, a tax that touched every Indian household. Twenty-four days and about 385 kilometres later, on a beach at Dandi, he picked up a lump of salty mud and broke the law — and millions followed.
The route follows the march south through Gujarat in its real order, with the dates from the day-by-day itinerary: the ashram, the first night's halt, the Kheda country, Borsad, Surat and Dandi, where a memorial now stands. The final stop covers what came next: Gandhi's arrest and the beatings at the Dharasana salt works that shocked the world.
