Love Live! Sunshine!! is set in a real corner of Shizuoka: the port city of Numazu and the coastal town of Uchiura, where the heroines come from.
The route follows the story from the cape-top school and the family inn to Awashima island, the station, the aquarium park and the city school of the film. Some places are real and appear as themselves; the school, the inn and the film's school are invented, and their pins mark the real buildings they are modelled on.
Hemingway wrote his last great novella in Cuba, about a fisherman and one enormous marlin. The places around it are real: the hotel room where he first lived, the bar he loved, the house where he wrote, and the fishing village next door.
This route follows the writer's Cuba from Old Havana to the harbour of Cojímar, where the Pilar was moored. The novella itself is under copyright, so the story is kept to its outline.
Dante wrote the Divine Comedy while banished from Florence. This route follows both the man and the people he put in the poem who were real: Francesca, Ugolino and Pia.
It runs from the Baptistery and the sentence of 1302, through the places tied to the poem's souls and the court of Verona, to Ravenna, where he died in 1321, and the empty tomb Florence built for him.
Grigory Melekhov loves another man's wife, goes to war, and changes sides in the Civil War four times. Sholokhov's novel of the Don Cossacks grew out of the Upper Don, and its landscape is still there.
The route moves from the invented hamlet of Tatarsky to Vyoshenskaya, the stanitsa of the 1919 uprising, then to the villages where Sholokhov lived and wrote. Tatarsky and the monument are marked approximately.
In 1973 Paul Theroux set out from London Victoria on a four-month railway loop through Europe, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, then came back on the Trans-Siberian Railway. His travelogue, published in 1975, became a classic of the genre.
This route follows episodes the book's reviewers single out, from the Direct-Orient Express to Istanbul, Calcutta, Burma, Vietnam and Tokyo. The book's own text could not be checked, so some pins mark a city's station rather than a scene, and some places are not safe to visit now.
A five-year-old orphan is led up a Swiss mountain path to live with a grandfather the whole village avoids. Johanna Spyri's 1881 novel follows Heidi from the alm to a grand house in Frankfurt, where homesickness sends her sleepwalking, and back to the mountain, where her friend Klara finally comes to visit.
The route runs from Ragaz, where Spyri wrote the book, through Maienfeld and the alm above it to Frankfurt and the tourist Heididorf. Spyri never names the exact hamlet or house, so most pins mark an area or a tradition.
A poet who nearly lost his head for his verses, Su Shi (Su Dongpo) was banished to Huangzhou, Huizhou and Hainan, and wrote some of his best work in exile.
The route follows his life in order, from his family home in Sichuan through the 1079 trial, three places of banishment, and his death at Changzhou in 1101. Several stops are rebuilt memorials or city-level markers, and each says so.
Two love stories shot in guerrilla style across Hong Kong in 1994: a policeman who buys cans of pineapple while he waits for a month to end, and a girl at a fast-food counter who sneaks into a policeman's flat.
The route follows the plot from a Tsim Sha Tsui nightclub to a block of guesthouses, then across the harbour to Lan Kwai Fong and the Mid-Levels escalator, and ends at Kai Tak, the old airport in Fallen Angels. Chungking Express stops are filming sites; the Midnight Express pin is approximate.
Sailor Moon is a fantasy about moon princesses and magical warriors, but its home ground is a real Tokyo neighbourhood. Author Naoko Takeuchi had lived in Azabu-Jūban, and apart from the fantasy elements most places in the story are modelled on real ones nearby.
This route visits five of them: the shopping street, a park under a highway, two shrines that stand in for the Hikawa Shrine of the story, and Tokyo Tower. The manga and the older anime sometimes used different real models, and the two shrine pins mark real stand-ins for the story's invented Hikawa Shrine.
Hitori Goto is a guitarist who loves music and can hardly talk to anyone. Her band, Kessoku Band, plays at a small live house in Shimokitazawa, and the story stays close to real music towns in Tokyo and Kanagawa.
This route follows the band from the stage that inspired STARRY to Hitori's home station and a summer day on Enoshima. Two venues are invented and modelled on real live houses; the pins mark those models.
Two Makoto Shinkai films, two love stories that never quite meet: a rainy-morning friendship in a Tokyo garden, and a boy and girl pulled apart across Japan, from a snowbound station in Tochigi to a rocket island in the south.
The route starts with The Garden of Words in Shinjuku Gyoen, then follows 5 Centimeters per Second through its three episodes: Tokyo and Iwafune, Tanegashima, and Tokyo again. Each stop names its film.
Horacio Oliveira, in Paris, spends his nights walking the city with the Maga and the Club de la Serpiente, until a baby's death breaks the group apart. Then the novel moves to Buenos Aires: a circus, a psychiatric clinic and a window over a courtyard.
The route follows the book's real Paris places, from the Pont des Arts to the Montparnasse cemetery, then its Buenos Aires scenes. Most Paris stops come from the Rutas Cervantes literary route; the Buenos Aires ones are invented and unpinned.
A Russian legend, sometimes called the Russian Atlantis, says a whole city sank into a lake rather than fall to the Mongols, and that on calm days you can still hear its bells. Rimsky-Korsakov turned it into an opera, and Werner Herzog went looking for it with a camera.
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.
In the summer of 1588 a Spanish fleet appeared off Cornwall with a plan to join Parma's army. Beacons carried the news to London, the English fleet came out of Plymouth, and within weeks fireships, a day of heavy gunnery and autumn storms had ended the plan.
The route follows the campaign through seven places, from the first sighting to a beach in County Sligo where three ships broke up. Most of the fighting was at sea, so the pins mark the nearest coast landmark, and the story of Drake and his game of bowls at Plymouth is labelled as legend.
In 1960 the novelist John Steinbeck fitted a pickup truck with a camper shell, named it Rocinante and set out from Long Island with his poodle, Charley. He wanted to see his country because he made his living writing about it, and his main question was what Americans are like today.
This route follows eight stops of the outer loop, from Sag Harbor through Maine, Niagara Falls and Minnesota to Montana, Yellowstone and Steinbeck's native Salinas Valley, then down to New Orleans. The book is a novelist's account: it has been challenged as partly fictionalised, so read the encounters as stories and the places as real.
Toru Watanabe, a drama student in late-1960s Tokyo, looks back on the years he spent between two women: Naoko, the fragile girlfriend of his dead best friend, and Midori, a classmate who is everything Naoko is not. Haruki Murakami's 1987 novel made him a superstar in Japan.
The route follows Watanabe across the city: his dormitory, a long Sunday walk by the moat, Naoko's apartment in Kokubunji, the campus, the streetcar to Midori's neighbourhood, a house at the edge of Kichijōji and the platform at Ueno. Murakami drew on his own student years, but the novel's dormitory and university are invented, so those two pins mark real stand-ins.
A stranger who looks foreign joins two writers at Patriarch's Ponds, predicts a death, and Moscow's strangest spring begins. In Bulgakov's novel the devil, as Woland, visits Soviet Moscow with a retinue that includes the cat Behemoth and the henchman Azazello, while Margarita bargains with him for the Master.
The route follows the Moscow chapters in order: the ponds where it all starts, a writers' club, a haunted flat, a stage show, a flight of revenge, a ball, a terrace beside the Kremlin and a farewell on the Sparrow Hills. Several places are invented or only inspired by real ones, and each stop says which.
Hemingway wrote A Moveable Feast about his poor, happy early years in 1920s Paris, working from notebooks he had left in trunks at the Ritz in 1928. It was published in 1964, after his death.
This route walks the memoir's Paris: the flat on the rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, Gertrude Stein's salon, Sylvia Beach's bookshop, the cafés of Montparnasse and Saint-Germain, and the Ritz where the notebooks resurfaced. Hemingway himself said the book may be read as imagination, so treat its scenes as a memory, not a record.
Jesse and Céline are now a couple with twin daughters, on a summer holiday in southern Greece. Before Midnight, the third and final film of Richard Linklater's Before trilogy, was shot in 15 days on the Peloponnese coast and turns one last night into a long, honest argument about love.
The route follows the film from an airport farewell to a writer's house, a castle, a harbour town and a resort hotel. The filmmakers have named few exact addresses, so the Pylos and hotel stops are approximate.
Gil Pender is a screenwriter with a nostalgia problem, in Paris with a fiancée and her wealthy parents. Every night at midnight a 1920s car pulls up and carries him back to the 1920s, among the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway and the surrealists. By day he is stuck in 2010.
This route follows the film from Monet's garden at Giverny to Pont Alexandre III, with the stops placed from a film-locations guide: where the 1920s scenes are shot you can still sit, eat and shop today. The party and flea-market scenes are approximate.
Downton Abbey is set on a fictional Yorkshire estate between 1912 and 1925, but its great house stands in Hampshire and its village in Oxfordshire. This route follows the story, from the Titanic news of series 1 to the royal visit of the 2019 film, to the real places behind it.
It takes in Highclere Castle, Bampton's church and library, a prison in Lincoln, castles in Scotland and Northumberland, the Ealing stage where the kitchen was built, and the film's parade village and York streets. Lacock's pin marks the village, as the sources name no exact spot.
Emily, a young marketing executive, is posted to Paris to give a French agency a social-media voice, and the show follows her across the city: the little square where she lives, her office by the Palais-Royal, a Left Bank café and the gardens and monuments she drifts through. In its fourth season the story reaches Rome, where Marcello shows her the Colosseum and the Trevi Fountain.
This route gathers the places that define Emily's Paris, from the Place de l'Estrapade — where her apartment faces Gabriel's restaurant across the square — to the Café de Flore, the Jardin du Luxembourg, the Palais Garnier, Montmartre's Sacré-Cœur and the French Open at Stade Roland Garros. It ends in Rome, at the two sights that seal her move to Italy.
A shy waitress at a Montmartre café staffed and frequented by eccentrics finds a metal box of childhood memorabilia hidden behind a bathroom tile and gets drawn into the lives around her: practical jokes on the nasty greengrocer Collignon, street scenes described aloud to a blind man, and a dropped photo album belonging to Nino, a collector of discarded photo-booth pictures.
The route follows her Paris from the café on Rue Lepic to the photo booths of the Gare de l'Est and the blue arrows on the steps of the Sacré-Cœur, taking in skipping stones on the Canal Saint-Martin and a surge of love on the Pont des Arts along the way. Nearly every stop is a real place you can visit.
A jazz pianist and an aspiring actress argue through the windows of their cars in a Los Angeles traffic jam, and the city itself becomes the romance: a night on a funicular, a broken projector, a kiss in a planetarium. Damien Chazelle shot La La Land in 40 days across Los Angeles in the summer of 2015, and most of the places the couple reaches for are still there.
This route follows Mia and Sebastian from the freeway ramps where they shout at each other to the jazz bar Seb finally gets to open — the 105/110 connector ramps, the Burbank café on the Warner lot, the Lighthouse Café and the pier beside it, the Rialto in South Pasadena, Griffith Observatory and Angels Flight. The film rarely names its own locations, so a few pins mark the real building that stood in for the one on screen.
