At 82, Leo Tolstoy slipped out of his house in the night, boarded a train with no destination in mind and was dead within ten days. The route follows that flight of November 1910, from his estate through two monasteries to a small railway station that suddenly drew the attention of the world.
It covers six stops in the Tula, Kaluga and Lipetsk regions. Three stops are approximate: two railway stations pinned by map search, and Astapovo, pinned on its village.
Tolstoy's huge novel carries its aristocratic families from the drawing rooms of 1805 into the wars against Napoleon, and its battlefields are among the most famous in fiction: a forgotten battery, a wounded prince staring at the sky, a civilian in a white hat on the wrong hill at the right moment.
The route follows the book from a Moscow house and a country estate through Schöngrabern and Austerlitz to 1812: Borodino, the council at Fili and Napoleon waiting on Poklonnaya Hill. Some stops are real places Tolstoy wrote about, others are real stand-ins for places that exist only in the novel; each says which. Dates follow the modern calendar, with Tolstoy's Old Style date noted where it differs.
In 1910 two expeditions set out for the bottom of the world. Roald Amundsen's Norwegians, masters of skis and sled dogs, reached the South Pole on 14 December 1911. Robert Falcon Scott's party arrived on 17 January 1912, 34 days later, to find a Norwegian tent already standing. Amundsen sent his news from Hobart; Scott's party of five died on the return journey.
The route follows both men from Cardiff and Madeira to their bases, up their two glaciers, to the Pole and to the endings: Amundsen's cables from Hobart and Scott's last camp. Antarctic pins mark glaciers and bays, not camps, and the ice has moved since.
Fitzgerald set The Great Gatsby on two invented peninsulas, West Egg and East Egg, but he built them from the Long Island he knew in Great Neck, where he lived from October 1922. Behind the glamour sit a dump, a station and a hotel suite that were all real.
This route follows Nick from the Eggs through the valley of ashes, Penn Station, the Queensboro Bridge and the Plaza Hotel. The Eggs, the valley and Gatsby's house are invented, so their pins mark the real places the novel is read against.
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.
In Wes Anderson's 2014 comedy, the concierge M. Gustave and his lobby boy Zero are caught up in a murder, a stolen painting and a war in the imaginary alpine republic of Zubrowka. The pink hotel on its crag is a model; almost everything else was shot in winter 2013 in eastern Germany, in and around the border town of Görlitz and across Saxony.
This route visits the real buildings: an empty Art Nouveau department store that became the hotel lobby, a shuttered concert hall, two castles that make up Madame D.'s estate, a former prison, the most beautiful dairy shop in the world and Dresden's baroque Zwinger. Zubrowka is fictional; these are the filming locations.
May 1914. Richard Hannay, bored in London after years in southern Africa, lets a frightened American into his flat — and a few days later finds him dead on the floor with a knife through his heart. Wanted for murder and hunted by a German spy ring, Hannay has three weeks to survive until he can warn the government. He runs for the moors of Galloway, then back south to a meeting of ministers and a Kent clifftop.
This is John Buchan's 1915 novel, not Hitchcock's very different film. London, St Pancras, Cairnsmore of Fleet and Moffat are named in the book; Hannay's hiding places on the moors and the Kent resort of Bradgate are not real, but the steps that gave the book its title are.
Ernest Shackleton set out in 1914 to cross Antarctica on foot. He never even landed. His ship, Endurance, was trapped in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea, drifted for ten months and was crushed and sunk, leaving 28 men on the ice with three lifeboats. What followed — months on drifting floes, a landing on Elephant Island, an 800-mile voyage in an open boat and a march across the mountains of South Georgia — ended with every one of them coming home alive.
The route follows that escape from South Georgia to the wreck and back, with dates from Shackleton's own account, South. Most of these places can only be reached by expedition ship.
