A short walk from the Rialto Bridge to Piazza San Marco packs in Shylock's Rialto, a clock tower from a Bond film, the basilica that holds Saint Mark, Galileo's telescope demonstration and Casanova's roof-top escape from the Doge's Palace.
Six stops lead from the Rialto to the Doge's Palace, each tied to a story: Shakespeare, Moonraker, the legend of Saint Mark, Galileo, Casanova and A Little Romance. The film links are screen fiction, not history.
Romeo and Juliet is set in Verona, The Taming of the Shrew in Padua and The Merchant of Venice in Venice: three cities of northern Italy, from Juliet's courtyard to the Rialto and the Ghetto.
The route visits five stops, two tied to the star-crossed lovers, one student comedy and two Venetian money-lending scenes. Several sites are traditional identifications rather than proven settings, and each stop says how firmly the place is tied to the play.
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.
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.
