After a first season in Malta, the show crossed the Adriatic to a walled city. Dubrovnik's two-kilometre ramparts, the fortress above its western gate and its late-medieval streets played King's Landing for everything the effects departments could not invent: the name-day combats, the riot at the gate, Cersei's walk of atonement.
Eight stops run in the order the episodes aired — Lovrijenac and the Pile Gate in the second season, the Rector's Palace when Dubrovnik doubled as Qarth, the Red Keep's gardens at Trsteno and the Meereen stand-in at Klis in the third and fourth, and the Jesuit stairs where the fifth-season finale was shot in October 2014. Only the exteriors live here: the Red Keep and the Sept of Baelor were computer-generated.
Huck Finn fakes his own murder and, with Jim, who has run away from slavery, takes a raft down the Mississippi. Their goal is Cairo, where Jim would be a free man the minute he saw it. They miss it in the fog and drift on into slave country, past a feud, two con men and a farm with the book's last twist.
Twain built St. Petersburg from his boyhood town of Hannibal. Most places in the novel are invented, so each pin marks a real landmark or stand-in, and the Grangerfords' country and Bricksville stay off the map.
HBO's Game of Thrones prequel was filmed primarily in the United Kingdom, and its Velaryon world is Cornish: the island seat of Driftmark is a tidal island, and the Stepstones war camp is a cove on the Lizard peninsula. For the capital and the free city of Pentos, the crew went to western and southern Spain.
The route follows the story from the Stepstones war (season 1, episode 3) through the Driftmark episodes to King's Landing in season 2. Sources do not name the exact streets used in Cáceres, so that pin marks the old town.
Edward the Confessor died childless in January 1066, and by the end of the year the crown had passed through Harold Godwinson to William of Normandy. Between the two coronations lie three battles in three weeks, fought at opposite ends of England by a king who marched his army the length of the country twice.
The route follows the crown from Westminster to the Yorkshire landing of Harald Hardrada, Fulford and Stamford Bridge, then to Pevensey, Hastings and the field at Battle, and back to Westminster on Christmas Day. The exact ground of several battles is debated, so those pins mark the best-known sites.
On 26 February 1815 Napoleon slipped away from Elba with some 1,000 men. Within a month he was back in the Tuileries, and by mid-July he had surrendered to the Royal Navy.
The route follows him stop by stop: his villa on Elba, the landing at Golfe-Juan, the meeting at Laffrey and the entry into Grenoble on the Route Napoléon, the Tuileries, the farms of Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte at Waterloo, then Malmaison and Île d'Aix, where his journey ended. The pins at Golfe-Juan and Grenoble mark the towns, not exact spots.
King Pelias sends his nephew Jason to fetch the Golden Fleece from Colchis, at the far end of the Black Sea, hoping he will never come back. Jason builds the Argo, gathers the greatest heroes of his day, Heracles among them, and sails east. Apollonius of Rhodes told the voyage in his Argonautica in the 3rd century BC, and he filled it with real coasts, harbours and local legends.
This route follows the outward voyage to Colchis. The way home is left out: ancient writers sent the Argo back by wildly different routes, up rivers into the Adriatic and even across Libya. The heroes and the fleece are myth; the shores, islands and ancient cities are real. Quotations are from R. C. Seaton's 1912 translation.
In May 1846 Ida Pfeiffer, a 48-year-old Viennese widow with grown-up sons and very little money, set off to go round the world — mostly alone, on cargo ships, on horseback and with caravans. She came home two and a half years later, in the middle of a revolution, and turned her diaries into a bestseller translated into seven languages. The Royal Geographical Society in London would not admit her, because it did not accept women.
The route follows her first world journey in order, from her own book, A Woman's Journey Round the World: Hamburg, the Brazilian forest, Cape Horn and Valparaíso, Tahiti, Canton, Baghdad, Persia and home. There are no visitor tips for Iraq or Iran.
