Florence, 1476: young Ezio Auditore watches his father and brothers hanged on false charges, and spends the next quarter-century hunting the men responsible across Tuscany, Romagna and Venice, all the way to the Vatican. Ubisoft's 2009 game rebuilt Renaissance Italy for climbing and running across rooftops, and mixed its invented feud between Assassins and Templars with real people — the Medici and Pazzi, Leonardo da Vinci, Caterina Sforza and the Borgia pope.
The route visits the real buildings and towns of the game. The Auditore family and their villa are fictional; most of the events around them are invented or rearranged from history.
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.
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.
Bohemia, 1403. Henry of Skalitz and Sir Hans Capon ride to Trosky Castle to find out which side Otto von Bergow is on, and the civil war between King Wenceslaus IV and King Sigismund drags them from the rocks of the Bohemian Paradise to the silver city of Kuttenberg, today Kutná Hora. The 2025 sequel by Warhorse Studios recreates its two big maps from real castles, villages and streets.
The route follows the story from Trosky to the siege of Suchdol. The game's version of each place is a 1403 reconstruction, so look for the castle ruins and rebuilt keeps rather than the exact buildings Henry sees. The first game's story ends just before it, so this route picks up at Trosky.
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.
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.
The pope is dead, four cardinals have been kidnapped, and a missing vial of antimatter will destroy the Vatican at midnight. The American symbologist Robert Langdon is called in and reads the threat as a path: four altars of the "Path of Illumination", tied to the classical elements, where a cardinal will die each hour from 8 p.m. With Vittoria Vetra, a CERN scientist, he races the clock across Rome — from a Pantheon they wrongly believe holds the first answer to a fountain where a cardinal is being drowned.
This route follows Ron Howard's 2009 film rather than Dan Brown's novel: the Pantheon and Raphael's tomb, the Chigi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, the obelisk in St Peter's Square, Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, the Fountain of the Four Rivers, the assassin's lair at Castel Sant'Angelo, and the midnight finale beneath St Peter's. All of it still stands; the caveat is that Rome's diocese refused the crew access to the churches, so several interiors in the film are studio sets.
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.
In Wes Anderson's 2014 comedy, the concierge M. Gustave and his lobby boy Zero are caught up in a murder, a stolen painting and a war in the imaginary alpine republic of Zubrowka. The pink hotel on its crag is a model; almost everything else was shot in winter 2013 in eastern Germany, in and around the border town of Görlitz and across Saxony.
This route visits the real buildings: an empty Art Nouveau department store that became the hotel lobby, a shuttered concert hall, two castles that make up Madame D.'s estate, a former prison, the most beautiful dairy shop in the world and Dresden's baroque Zwinger. Zubrowka is fictional; these are the filming locations.
