In spring 1453 Sultan Mehmed II besieged the last Byzantine capital with a new fortress, huge cannons and ships hauled over a hill. Constantine XI held out for weeks, and the city fell 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.
In 1973 Paul Theroux set out from London Victoria on a four-month railway loop through Europe, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, then came back on the Trans-Siberian Railway. His travelogue, published in 1975, became a classic of the genre.
This route follows episodes the book's reviewers single out, from the Direct-Orient Express to Istanbul, Calcutta, Burma, Vietnam and Tokyo. The book's own text could not be checked, so some pins mark a city's station rather than a scene, and some places are not safe to visit now.
The French Way is the most popular route of the ancient pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, It starts at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, crosses the Pyrenees, and from Roncesvalles on the Spanish side still runs about 780 kilometres west to Galicia. It is on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
This route follows it through seven landmarks: a mountain gate, a village of legend, a pilgrims' bridge, a great cathedral, a knights' tournament, a Galician hilltop and the tomb of St James.
In Alfonso Cuarón's Roma, a live-in maid named Cleo moves through a year of heartbreak in Mexico City's Colonia Roma, from her employers' house on Tepeji Street to the street violence of 10 June 1971 and a rescue on the beach at Tuxpan. Cuarón built the story from his own childhood memories.
The route follows the film in order across five places: the house, the Teatro Metropólitan, a rebuilt cinema corner, the Corpus Christi massacre site and the beach. Several were rebuilt or filmed elsewhere, so the pins are marked approximate.
Clarín's novel hides Oviedo behind the name Vetusta, a provincial capital of gossip, piety and boredom where Ana Ozores, the Regenta, is slowly worn down. It begins with the Magistral watching the town through a telescope and ends with Ana fainting in his chapel.
The route follows seven scenes from the tower to the duel and the confessional, and ends at the modern statue of Ana. Spanish guides tie some scenes to real Oviedo; where they do not, the pin is approximate or absent.
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.
