Hans Christian Andersen's Denmark runs from a cobbler's house in Odense to the Royal Danish Theatre, the colourful quay of Nyhavn and the bronze Little Mermaid on Copenhagen's Langelinie.
The route follows the shoemaker's son who left Odense at 14 to become an actor; a theatre colleague told him he was a poet instead. Two Odense houses, three Copenhagen landmarks and a ride at Tivoli show where his life and his stories touch the map. The birthplace house is traditionally identified, not proven.
In May 1863 a Hamburg professor of mineralogy decodes a 300-year-old note in runes: go down the crater of Snæfell in Iceland and you will reach the centre of the Earth. Within days he drags his reluctant nephew Axel north by train, steamer and schooner, hires a silent Icelandic guide named Hans and climbs into the volcano.
Verne sets up the impossible with a timetable you could almost follow today — Altona station, Kiel, Copenhagen, Reykjavík, the hamlet of Stapi below the glacier. What happens underground is pure fiction, but the way out is real: three months later the travellers are spat out of Stromboli, an island volcano off Sicily, more than 3,000 km from where they went in.
