Eat Pray Love, the 2010 film of Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir, was shot around Piazza Navona in Rome, at a pizzeria in Naples, in Pataudi, India, and around Ubud and Padang Padang Beach in Bali.
Julia Roberts plays Liz, who leaves a settled life for a year of travel: in the memoir, four months in Italy eating, three in India praying and the end of the year in Bali. This route follows those three legs through the places where the scenes were filmed. The memoir's ashram is unnamed, so the India stop marks only the town where the film shot it.
Out of Africa was filmed around Nairobi and the Ngong Hills in Kenya, with the Danish scenes shot at Castle Rising in Norfolk, England. Sydney Pollack's 1985 film, based on Karen Blixen's memoir, uses the Muthaiga Country Club, the coffee farm that is now the Karen Blixen Museum and the Chyulu Hills standing in for the Ngong Hills.
This route follows Blixen's years in Kenya and the places the film made famous: the railway museum whose locomotive pulls the opening train, the club where Farah is turned away, the farm at the foot of the Ngong Hills, the Norfolk castle that plays Denmark, Voi Airport where Denys Finch Hatton's plane went down, and the obelisk grave on the hillside above Nairobi.
Disguised as a beggar, a Belgian-French explorer walked into the forbidden city of Lhasa among pilgrims. Alexandra David-Néel and her adopted son Yongden stayed two months in 1924, then slipped away before the governor could act.
The route follows her from Kumbum, where she studied for years, across the Kyi to the Potala and the Monlam crowds, then on to Samye, Tsetang and Gyantse. Pins are area-level, and critics have disputed her account since 1972.
The legend of Kitezh, the Russian Atlantis, says the city sank into Lake Svetloyar rather than fall to the Mongols. The route also visits Gorodets on the Volga, said to be Little Kitezh, and Kideksha near Suzdal, the name's folk origin. On calm days, they say, its bells can still be heard.
The route follows the story from the folk etymology of the name, through the town said to be Little Kitezh and the forests of the Kerzhenets, to the lake itself and the St Petersburg stage where the opera first sounded. Kitezh is a legend: the places are traditional identifications, not proof.
