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.
Red Army soldier Sukhov wants only to go home to his wife, but the desert keeps handing him other people's problems: a man buried to the neck, a harem left in his care, a bandit leader on the loose. The 1969 Soviet classic turned a handful of desert locations into film legend.
The route follows the shoot in two expeditions: the Caspian shore and the Sarykum dune in Dagestan, then the Karakum sands and the ruins of Merv in Turkmenistan. Several stops are approximate, because the film's village was a temporary set.
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.
Pushkin's novel in verse follows a bored St. Petersburg dandy who inherits a country estate, rejects a girl's love letter, kills his friend in a duel, and years later finds her transformed into the star of Petersburg society.
The route runs from the capital's garden walks to the road into Moscow and the exile estate where he wrote part of the book. Most places in the verse are glimpsed rather than described, so several pins are approximate or stand-ins.
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.
Anne Shirley, a talkative red-haired orphan, is sent by mistake to a farm in Avonlea and wins over everyone, including the reader. Lucy Maud Montgomery's 1908 novel is hugely loved in Japan, where it is known as Red-haired Anne.
The route follows the book's real island: the village behind fictional Bolingbroke, the lake Anne renames, Green Gables itself, the woods she fears, her Charlottetown college and the window where it was written. Avonlea and the Cuthberts are invented; the pins mark the real places that inspired them.
Tolstoy's novel begins on a Moscow railway platform and ends on another. Between them Levin finds Kitty on a skating pond, Anna meets Vronsky off a train, and the lovers' story runs through snowstorms, a racecourse and a spa town before they flee to Italy.
The nine stops follow the novel's order across Russia, Germany and Italy. Tolstoy rarely names the buildings, so most pins mark the station or town the scene points to.
A girl from a rich family disguises herself as a boy to go to school, falls in love with a classmate who never guesses, and is promised to another man. When he dies, the earth opens at his grave and the two fly away as butterflies. One of China's four great folk tales, it is often called the oriental Romeo and Juliet.
The route follows the tale from the heroine's home in Shangyu, to the school in Hangzhou, to the Ningbo temple and tomb, then to a rival claim in Yixing and a statue in Verona. Every Chinese site is local tradition rather than proven history.
Two snake spirits take human form, one borrows an umbrella from a young pharmacist, and an abbot spends the rest of the story trying to separate them. One of China's best-loved folk tales still has its stage set in real places.
The route follows the popular opera version from the legend's mountain origin, through Hangzhou's West Lake and the flooded temple at Jinshan, to Broken Bridge and the pagoda where the White Snake ends up imprisoned. The tale exists in many versions; this route follows the standard opera telling.
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.
Ang Lee's wuxia romance sends a retired swordsman, a runaway governor's daughter and a stolen sword across a China that was assembled from many places. The film began shooting in Xinjiang on 31 July 1999 and then moved to the Jiangnan region and Beijing.
This route follows the story through the real locations behind it: a desert ghost city, two Anhui villages, the Anji bamboo forest, and Cangyan Mountain, which plays the fictional Wudang. The real Mount Wudang sits in the story, but the film was not shot there.
Jin Yong, the grand master of martial arts fiction, was born in Haining, Zhejiang. This route follows him out of the family house, to the tide he loved, and then across China to the places his heroes fight: a lake in Jiaxing, an island off Zhoushan, the mountains and monastery of Hua, Shaolin and Wudang, and a cell under Hangzhou's West Lake.
The real landmarks are documented; the sects, manors and duels set at them are fiction. Each stop says which is which, and where a pin marks the real place, it is not a scene.
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.
Two Mamoru Hosoda films are built on places from his own life. Summer Wars is set in Ueda, Nagano; Wolf Children draws on Kamiichi, Hosoda's home town in Toyama, and the hills around it.
The route visits Ueda Station and the castle gate seen in Summer Wars, then Hitotsubashi University, a farmhouse in Kamiichi and a school in Namerikawa from Wolf Children. The Kamiichi pin marks the district, not the house.
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.
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.
The French Way is the most popular route of the ancient pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, It starts at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, crosses the Pyrenees, and from Roncesvalles on the Spanish side still runs about 780 kilometres west to Galicia. It is on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
This route follows it through seven landmarks: a mountain gate, a village of legend, a pilgrims' bridge, a great cathedral, a knights' tournament, a Galician hilltop and the tomb of St James.
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.
On New Year's Eve a Moscow surgeon goes to the bathhouse with his friends, wakes up in Leningrad and walks into a flat that looks exactly like his own. The Soviet classic that Russia still watches every 31 December starts as a joke about identical buildings and ends as a love story.
The route follows Zhenya's night from his new flat and the banya to the Leningrad airport, the identical building, and the station, then back to Moscow. The caveat: both the "Leningrad" and the "Moscow" houses were shot in the same Moscow district, and the story's street had been renamed years before.
Pushkin's only completed novel follows Pyotr Grinev, a young officer sent to a log-fenced fortress on the Orenburg steppe, where he falls in love with the captain's daughter Masha and crosses paths with Pugachev, the rebel who claims to be Emperor Peter III. The book is a romanticized account of Pugachev's Rebellion of 1773-1774, not a record of it.
The route follows the novel from besieged Orenburg through the Belogorsk fortress, Berda, Kazan, Tsarskoye Selo and Moscow. Each stop separates what Pushkin invented from what history records; Belogorsk exists only on the page, with the real fortress of Tatishchevo as its stand-in.
Grigory Pechorin, bored and brilliant, drifts through the Caucasus leaving damage behind him: a smuggler's hut at Taman, the spa season at Pyatigorsk and Kislovodsk, and a duel on a cliff ledge. Lermontov wrote five linked tales and was himself killed in a duel at Pyatigorsk in 1841.
The route follows the book's order, from a snowy pass and a seaport to the spring, the harp pavilion and the rock gate where Pechorin plays his games, ending on Mashuk where the author met his own fate. Some pins mark real places that only stand in for the novel's.
