On 16 July 1969 a Saturn V lifted the Apollo 11 crew off a Florida launch pad; eight days later their capsule dropped into the Pacific. In between, the first people walked on another world while an estimated 600 million watched on Earth.
The route follows the mission through six stops: the launch pad in Florida, Mission Control in Houston, Tranquility Base on the Moon, the Australian dish that carried the moonwalk pictures, the splashdown and the capsule's museum home. The Moon stop has no pin because the map shows Earth only; its lunar coordinates are given in the text.
The Olympian gods' birthplaces are scattered across Greece: Zeus in a cave on Crete or on Mount Lykaion, Apollo and Artemis on Delos, Apollo's oracle at Delphi, and the gods' home on Mount Olympus.
The route follows the myths from Zeus's cradle to the mountain where the gods live. Ancient authors disagreed about where Zeus was born, so those first two stops are traditional claims, not proven sites.
Rocky is set and largely filmed in Philadelphia: Rocky Balboa's Kensington home, the Italian Market on 9th Street, Pat's King of Steaks, the Art Museum steps and the Spectrum arena in South Philadelphia all appear in the 1976 film.
The route follows the story from the opening fight on 25 November 1975 to the New Year's Day title bout. The Spectrum is gone, and the fight itself was shot in Los Angeles.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) was filmed at a Scottish railway viaduct, Glasgow's streets dressed as 1969 New York, the streets of Fez playing Tangier, and Sicily around Syracuse, including the Ear of Dionysius and Castello Maniace.
Six stops follow the story from a 1944 train to the Siege of Syracuse in 214 BC. Filming ran from June 2021, and Archimedes' tomb was filmed at Pinewood rather than on location.
Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey was filmed in Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, Scotland and Malta, with Aït Benhaddou as Troy, Favignana as the goat island and the Aeolian Islands as Aeolia.
Matt Damon's Odysseus spends twenty years getting home. His crew is eaten by a Cyclops, crushed by Laestrygonians and sent to the underworld; Calypso keeps him on Ogygia, and Ithaca is full of suitors when he finally washes ashore.
This route follows the film's locations in story order, from the fall of Troy to the castle above Favignana that served as Ithaca. Every stop is a real place, but the mythical islands and monsters are not.
Netherfield Park is let at last, and Austen's novel follows Elizabeth Bennet from her family's village to a Kent parsonage and on to Derbyshire. The houses of the book are described rather than mapped, so this route follows the real places where the 2005 film and the 1995 BBC series found them.
Nine stops follow the story in order, from Longbourn to the inn at Lambton. Each pin is a real filming site standing in for a place in the book; only Gracechurch Street is the real London street the novel itself names.
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.
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.
King Pelias sends his nephew Jason to fetch the Golden Fleece from Colchis, at the far end of the Black Sea, hoping he will never come back. Jason builds the Argo, gathers the greatest heroes of his day, Heracles among them, and sails east. Apollonius of Rhodes told the voyage in his Argonautica in the 3rd century BC, and he filled it with real coasts, harbours and local legends.
This route follows the outward voyage to Colchis. The way home is left out: ancient writers sent the Argo back by wildly different routes, up rivers into the Adriatic and even across Libya. The heroes and the fleece are myth; the shores, islands and ancient cities are real. Quotations are from R. C. Seaton's 1912 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.
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.
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.
