In 218 BC the Carthaginian general Hannibal set out from Spain to attack Rome by the one route the Romans never expected: overland, across the Pyrenees, the Rhône and the Alps, with tens of thousands of soldiers, horses and 37 war elephants. Five months later he came down into the plain of the Po with a battered but unbeaten army, and within weeks had won his first two victories in Italy.
The route follows the march as told by the Greek historian Polybius, who wrote about seventy years later and walked the Alpine route himself. Nobody knows for certain where Hannibal crossed the Rhône or which pass he used, so several pins are marked speculative.
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.
Florence, 1476: young Ezio Auditore watches his father and brothers hanged on false charges, and spends the next quarter-century hunting the men responsible across Tuscany, Romagna and Venice, all the way to the Vatican. Ubisoft's 2009 game rebuilt Renaissance Italy for climbing and running across rooftops, and mixed its invented feud between Assassins and Templars with real people — the Medici and Pazzi, Leonardo da Vinci, Caterina Sforza and the Borgia pope.
The route visits the real buildings and towns of the game. The Auditore family and their villa are fictional; most of the events around them are invented or rearranged from history.
In the spring of 334 BC Alexander, the 22-year-old king of Macedon, crossed into Asia with an army of Macedonians and Greeks to make war on the Persian Empire. Eleven years later he had defeated the Persian king Darius III three times, taken Egypt, burned Persepolis and led his men to the rivers of the Punjab — and then died in Babylon at the age of 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.
