The legend of Romulus and Remus begins at Alba Longa in the Alban Hills and ends on Rome's Palatine and Aventine hills, with a she-wolf's cave and a fig tree along the Tiber in between. The bronze Capitoline Wolf still carries the story to visitors on the Capitoline Hill.
The route follows the myth from the twins' birth to the quarrel that leaves Romulus as founder. Most sites are traditional rather than proven, and the stops say so.
York has been defended by walls since Roman times, and this walk strings together six places around them: the Multangular Tower, York Minster, Clifford's Tower, Micklegate Bar, the Shambles and Walmgate Bar.
Each stop is a moment in the city's story, from a Roman fort built around 71 AD to a siege in 1644.
St Petersburg's history can be walked in an afternoon: from the Peter and Paul Fortress, where the city was founded in 1703, past Kazan Cathedral on Nevsky Prospect to Senate Square, Palace Square and the cruiser Aurora on the Neva.
Seven stops follow the city from its foundation through the Decembrist revolt of 1825, the assassination of Alexander II, Bloody Sunday in 1905 and the events of October 1917. The stops zigzag across the centre, so the pins are markers rather than a single line.
The Easter Rising of April 1916 was fought across central Dublin, from the General Post Office on O'Connell Street to the Royal College of Surgeons on St Stephen's Green and the canal at Mount Street Bridge.
This route follows the week from the muster at Liberty Hall and the seizure of City Hall to the surrender from Moore Street and the executions at Kilmainham Gaol. Several stops can be visited today.
The Cathar story runs through Béziers, Carcassonne and Montségur: six places in southern France where the Albigensian Crusade of 1209 to 1255 left its mark.
The route starts with the fall of Béziers and Carcassonne in 1209, continues through the castles of Lastours and the well of Minerve, and ends at Montségur and Quéribus, the last strongholds. Several stops are ruins or later rebuilds, so what you see is not always the medieval Cathar castle.
In 1612 a Nizhny Novgorod merchant, Kuzma Minin, and Dmitry Pozharsky raised the volunteer army that cleared Polish forces from the Moscow Kremlin. The route follows it from the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin through Yaroslavl and the Trinity Lavra to Red Square.
The five stops trace the militia's march and the monuments to its leaders. The Yaroslavl pin marks the city, as the sources name no building.
The route from the Varangians to the Greeks ran from Staraya Ladoga by the Volkhov and Lake Ilmen, down the Dnieper past Kyiv and Khortytsia, to Berezan and the Golden Horn of Constantinople. It is the river road that linked the Baltic to the Byzantine capital.
The six stops follow Rurik, Oleg and Sviatoslav along it, through the Primary Chronicle's tales of 862, 882, 907 and 972. Several accounts are legend-tinged, and the stops are not in strict date order because they follow the river.
Charlemagne's reign is traced here through Pavia, Paderborn, Roncesvalles, Rome and Aachen, the places where he won a kingdom, met a pope, lost his rearguard, became emperor and was buried.
The route follows five moments from 774 to 814: the surrender of the Lombard capital, the court in Saxony, the ambush at a mountain pass, the Christmas Day coronation of 800 and the chapel of his imperial capital. The exact site of the ambush is disputed.
Braveheart's Scotland is partly the real thing and partly Ireland: Wallace's village of Lanark was built in Glen Nevis, but York is Trim Castle, Stirling Bridge was staged on the Curragh and Longshanks' court is Bective Abbey.
The route follows seven filming locations in the order of the story, from the Highland glen to the Irish fields, lakes and ruins that stood in for the battles and castles. Most of the shoot moved to Ireland at short notice, so the film's map is split between two countries.
Demon Slayer is set in Taisho-era Japan, and fans trace its real places from the Kamado shrines of Dazaifu and Beppu to Mt. Kumotori and Asakusa.
Tanjiro's story runs from Mt. Kumotori to the Infinity Castle, and the route follows the fan trail in story order: two Kamado shrines, the mountain where he burned charcoal, the boulder he had to cut, the wisteria park fans read as the Final Selection, Asakusa and Yoshiwara, Ginzan Onsen as the Swordsmith Village, and the Aizu ryokan whose lobby looks like the Infinity Castle. Most are working shrines, streets and businesses; visit quietly.
Europe's Thirty Years' War runs from a window in Prague Castle to the town halls of Münster and Osnabrück. This route follows it through the battlefields of White Mountain, Magdeburg, Breitenfeld, Lützen and Nördlingen — from the defenestration of 1618 to the peace of 1648.
The stops are in the order the war happened: the castle window in Prague, the hill where Frederick V's army broke, the square where 27 rebel leaders were executed, then the sacked city of Magdeburg, Gustavus Adolphus's victories at Breitenfeld and Lützen, the Swedish collapse at Nördlingen, and the two Westphalian town halls where the treaties were finally signed. Nine places, thirty years, one continuous story.
Fallout 4 turns Boston into the post-nuclear Commonwealth, and most of its landmarks are real: Fenway Park becomes Diamond City, the Old North Church hides the Railroad, and the USS Constitution still floats in Charlestown harbor. The fourth main Fallout game, it is set ten years after Fallout 3.
This route follows the Sole Survivor from Vault 111 outside Concord to the Institute beneath MIT, then to the Castle on Castle Island, the Navy Yard and Bunker Hill. Some story sites are invented, so their pins mark the real places that inspired or contain them.
Bandit Petersburg (Бандитский Петербург), the 2000–07 crime saga, is set and filmed in St Petersburg: the courtyard at Bolshaya Monetnaya 11, the Benois House on Kamennoostrovsky Prospect and the Kresty prison are among its most recognisable addresses.
This route follows the city of Film 2, The Lawyer (2000), from Chelishev's old courtyard and the police headquarters on the Petrograd side to Antibiotic's Fontanka restaurant, Zvantsev's flat in the Benois House, the gates of Kresty and the Angleterre restaurant where the film ends. All seven stops are real places; one is an active police building and one a working hotel.
Nicosia's walled old city is a five-kilometre ring of Venetian fortifications with three surviving gates — Famagusta, Kyrenia and Paphos. Inside are the Selimiye Mosque, the Bedesten, the caravanserai of Büyük Han and Ledra Street, the shopping street that became a symbol of the island's division. The walk crosses the Green Line on foot.
The route begins at Eleftheria Square, enters by Famagusta Gate and loops through the old city: the Selimiye and the Bedesten, Büyük Han, Kyrenia Gate, the Ledra Street crossing, the Ömeriye Mosque and Paphos Gate. The Selimiye, Bedesten, Büyük Han and Kyrenia Gate stand north of the Green Line; the rest are in the south.
Age of Empires II follows Joan of Arc from a French army camp at Vaucouleurs to the stake at Rouen. The designers said they deferred to history wherever it did not interfere with gameplay, and the campaign's spine — Orléans, Patay, Reims, Paris — is close to the record. But the game also bends the story, placing Joan at a battle she missed and turning a failed assault on Paris into a betrayal. This route follows the campaign's stops in order and sets each one beside what the sources say happened there.
In January 1981 a CIA team led by Russell Adler hunts Perseus, a Soviet spy Adler believed dead. The trail runs from an Amsterdam bar and a Vietnam flashback to East Berlin, the KGB's Lubyanka and a Cuban firefight, before reaching the Solovetsky Islands. The route follows the campaign's real places in mission order and keeps the game's story apart from the real history of each place. A final stop marks the alternate ending at Duga.
In August 2010 a Bohemia Interactive team went to Lemnos to gather references, and came back with the material for Altis, the island where Arma 3 is set. Two years later two of the studio's developers were arrested on the same island and held for 129 days on suspicion of spying. After the arrest the game's main island, until then called Limnos, was renamed Altis; Stratis kept its name.
The route follows the real island from Myrina and its castle, past a church with no roof and a miniature desert, to the airport and the old Allied base at Moudros, then across the water to Agios Efstratios. Arma 3's war is set in 2034–2035; the harbours, theatre and dunes are not.
Wim Wenders' Perfect Days follows Hirayama, a Tokyo toilet cleaner who keeps his days exactly the same: the same overalls, the same cassette tapes, the same sandwich under the trees. The city changes around him; he notices the light through the leaves.
This route follows the film's real Tokyo, from the old apartment east of the Sumida to four of the Tokyo Toilet project's designer facilities, the shrine bench where he eats lunch, the sento and Asakusa bar that fill his evenings, and the bridge where the story ends.
Red Dead Redemption 2 follows the Van der Linde gang in 1899 across five invented U.S. states, with Saint Denis built on New Orleans and Guarma reached on a ship bound for Cuba.
This route follows the main story from Blackwater to Saint Denis and an island beyond. Pins mark only places the sources name; the rest stay unpinned and keep their place in the sequence.
Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, goes looking for the secret of immortality. This route follows the epic from its city to the Cedar Forest and the flood hero's home, then to the Nineveh library where the tablets were found.
The poem's places are legend and the tablets' places are archaeology; each stop says which, and which pins are only candidates. The Iraqi sites are not visitor destinations.
The boy born on the Onon River became the ruler of the largest land empire in history. This route follows him from the steppe camps of Khentii, through the war that began at a border town in Kazakhstan, to the siege of Samarkand and a death in the middle of a campaign.
The sources disagree on his birth year, his birthplace and his grave. Where the Secret History of the Mongols gives a legend and other sources give the record, the stops say which is which.
The fall of Constantinople in 1453, from Rumeli Hisarı on the Bosphorus and the chain across the Golden Horn to Galata hill and Hagia Sophia. Mehmed II's huge cannons and ships hauled over land took the city on 29 May.
This route follows the siege in order: the fortress on the Bosphorus, the chain across the Golden Horn and the ships that bypassed it, the land-wall gates, and Hagia Sophia. Exact positions of some events are not recorded, so several pins are approximate.
A few hundred Cossacks, a Stroganov fortress on the Kama and a khan's capital on the Irtysh: in four years Yermak turned a raid into the Russian entry into Siberia.
The route follows the campaign from Orel-gorodok over the Urals to the battle at Chuvash Cape, the fall of Qashliq, Yermak's death at the Vagay and the founding of Tobolsk. Dates differ between chronicles and modern sources, and the sources mark the death site and the legends as uncertain; the notes at each stop say which.
Attack on Titan is set behind three great walls, but its author comes from a real mountain town in Ōita, Japan. Hajime Isayama grew up in Ōyama, now part of Hita, and used the landscape around it as the model for his world.
The route follows the town from his birthplace to the 2014 event that made him Tourism Ambassador, and then to the statues of Eren, Mikasa, Armin and Levi that Hita set up in 2020 and 2021. The sources do not tie the series to any single real wall, so the stops mark the town's own tributes.
