In 180 AD the Roman general Maximus leads the Roman army to victory against Germanic tribes, then refuses his loyalty to the new emperor and loses everything: his wife and son are murdered, and slave traders sell him to a gladiator trainer. Proximo takes him to fight in Rome's Colosseum, where he overpowers and kills Commodus in a final duel.
The route follows the shoot between January and May 1999: the Surrey wood where the Germania battle burned, the Val d'Orcia valley of Maximus' farm, the Moroccan ksar that played Zuccabar and the one-third Colosseum replica built on Malta's Fort Ricasoli — ending at the real Colosseum, where the story's final duel is set.
Ridley Scott's 2005 epic follows Balian, a French blacksmith turned Baron of Ibelin, from his village to Messina, Jerusalem, Kerak, the desert defeat at Hattin and the siege that ends the film. Every stop pairs a scene with the place where it was shot, or with the real place the scene stands for.
The film was made in Spain and Morocco, not the Holy Land, so the route moves between sets and history. Where the film departs from the record, the stop says so: the historical Balian was a prominent lord of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, not a French artisan.
December 1499: Cesare Borgia's army has struck the Auditore villa at Monteriggioni, killing Mario and seizing the Apple of Eden. Assassin's Creed Brotherhood sends Ezio to Rome, the center of Templar power, to take the fight to the Borgia-led Templars, and the hunt for the Apple runs from St Peter's Basilica to a temple hidden underneath the Colosseum.
This route follows Ezio from the villa at Monteriggioni through Borgia Rome — the Castel Sant'Angelo fortress, the Pantheon, St Peter's and the Colosseum — to Viana in Navarre, Spain, where his fight with Cesare ends on the battlements. Every stop is a real place you can visit.
