Samuel Johnson and James Boswell toured Scotland and the Hebrides in 1773, visiting Monboddo House, Raasay, Inch Kenneth, Iona and Auchinleck. Johnson was sixty-three, Boswell thirty-two, and the journey took eighty-three days.
The route follows five places where their two books touch real ground: a philosopher in farmer's clothes, a dance on Raasay, island hospitality, the ruins of Iona and Boswell's family seat in Ayrshire. The sources do not give exact dates for each stop.
Leonardo da Vinci's life runs from Vinci, where he was born in 1452, through Milan, Florence and Rome to Amboise in France, where he died in 1519 and was buried at the château.
The route follows six places tied to his life: the Museo Leonardiano in Vinci, Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Florence's Palazzo Vecchio, the Belvedere Courtyard in Rome, Clos Lucé and the Château d'Amboise. Where his remains lie today is only presumed.
Mary, Queen of Scots was born at Linlithgow Palace in 1542 and beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle in 1587, with Holyroodhouse, Loch Leven and Carlisle along the way. Her life runs from a royal cradle to a prison and a scaffold.
The route follows seven places: her birthplace, the Edinburgh palace where Rizzio was murdered, the island prison she escaped, the battlefield at Langside, two English prisons and the site of her execution. Fotheringhay Castle was demolished, so only earthworks remain.
8 Mile was filmed on location in Detroit: the trailer park in Warren, the New Center Stamping Plant, the Penobscot Building and the Shelter.
The route follows Jimmy Smith Jr. from his mother's trailer to the rap battles at the Shelter. It takes in the parking garage inside the old Michigan Theatre, the demolished Chin Tiki club and the empty lot where Cheddar Bob shoots himself. Some sites are gone; the Shelter and the Penobscot still stand.
Before the white whale there is a cold December and a wrong turn at the docks. Ishmael arrives in New Bedford to find the Nantucket packet gone, rents half a bed at the Spouter-Inn, sits through a sermon on Jonah, crosses to Nantucket and signs aboard the Pequod, which leaves on Christmas Day.
New Bedford had overtaken Nantucket as the country's top whaling port by 1840, yet Ishmael is set on sailing from the island. The route follows his first chapters. The inn, the Try Pots and the Pequod are invented, so their pins mark real places that stand in for them; the chapel is real.
In AD 79 a mountain above the Bay of Naples blew apart. Pliny the Younger watched from Misenum across the water, lost his uncle, the admiral Pliny the Elder, to the eruption, and years later described it for the historian Tacitus in two letters: the only eyewitness account that survives.
The route follows the eruption in the order of its events, from the mountain's first column to Pompeii, Herculaneum, the beach at Stabiae and back to Misenum. Pliny's letters never mention Pompeii or Herculaneum, so those stops come from archaeology. The traditional date is 24 August, but newer evidence points to the autumn.
