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.
A rabbi shapes a figure from river clay and a slip of paper gives it life. The Golem of Prague is among the best-known legends of the city, yet historians find it first told in the 19th century, long after the real Rabbi Loew died in 1609.
The route follows the legend from the Vltava to the Old New Synagogue and a modern television tower, and sets it beside what the sources show: an emperor's audience, a tomb and a 1915 novel.
On 26 August 1768 the Endeavour left Plymouth with 94 people aboard, bound for Tahiti to watch Venus cross the Sun. Almost three years later she anchored off the Kent coast again, having reached New Zealand and the east coast of Australia, and with many of her people lost to disease on the way home.
The route follows James Cook's own journal and modern accounts through ten stops, from the anchorage at Plymouth to the Great Barrier Reef and Batavia. Dates follow modern accounts, which sometimes differ by a day from the journal.
The Travels of Marco Polo runs from Venice and Acre to Kublai Khan's Xanadu, then south to Hangzhou and home again. In 1271 a seventeen-year-old Venetian set out with his father and uncle and did not come home for 24 years.
The route follows the book from Venice and Acre to the Persian Gulf, across the Pamir highlands and the desert to Kublai's summer and winter capitals, south to Hangzhou and the port of Zayton, and home again. Some of the roads are reconstructed by scholars, and Polo sometimes exaggerates, so each stop notes where the evidence is thin.
