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.
Proust's Combray is the village of Illiers, his Balbec is the seaside resort of Cabourg, and his narrator's walks lead through the Champs-Élysées in Paris and on to Venice.
The route follows five places from the novel across its volumes, from the madeleine memory in Combray to a trip to Venice with the narrator's mother. Most pins are approximate, since Proust blends real places into invented ones.
Two Naughty Dog adventures, two treasure hunts: Nathan Drake chases Marco Polo's Cintamani Stone from an Istanbul museum through Borneo and Nepal to the legend of Shambhala, then follows Francis Drake's secret to a lost city in the Arabian sands.
The route follows both games in order. The legendary cities are invented or borrowed, and the game rarely names a real site, so every pin marks the country, city or region behind the chapter.
In September 1978, an 18-year-old photographer named Reza Shirazi comes home to Tehran and is pulled into the last days before Black Friday. The developers built the game from interviews with forty Iranians who lived through the revolution and from photographs by Michel Setboun; the streets, the cinema hideout and the prison are real places, filled with a fictional cast.
This route follows the game's 1978 story in order, from a Hasanabad rooftop to the shooting at Jaleh Square, then ends in the Evin Prison interrogation that frames the whole game. It is a route through the city the game recreates, not a walking itinerary.
A dumped teenager from Ohio crosses Europe to find his German pen pal: London, Paris, Amsterdam, Bratislava, Berlin and finally the Vatican. The joke is that nearly all of it was shot in one city, Prague, apart from a single beach scene in Rostock.
Each stop pairs the story city with the real place that played it, so you can see where the fiction and the film set part ways. Story cities are approximate; the Prague filming spots are exact.
In July 1497 four ships left Lisbon to find a sea route to India. Vasco da Gama's fleet crossed the open South Atlantic, rounded the Cape, worked its way up the African coast, and reached Calicut on 20 May 1498. The voyage ended with two ships and over half the men lost.
The route follows the voyage from the Restelo shore in Lisbon to Calicut, then home via Anjediva and the Azores. Landing sites are mostly debated or only broadly known, so most pins are approximate. Dates are as the sources give them, in the Julian calendar then in use.
The novel was banned in the Soviet Union, so David Lean could not shoot his epic there. Instead he built Moscow in a field outside Madrid, turned the pine woods of Soria into the Urals and sent a second crew to the snows of Finland.
The route follows the story in order, from the dam of the frame story to the ice palace at Varykino, and shows where each scene was really filmed. Most pins mark general areas, not exact camera spots.
A Cornish knight fetches an Irish princess for his uncle the king, and a love potion on the ship ruins everything. Tristan and Iseult is a medieval legend told in many versions since the 12th century, and every retelling sets it on a slightly different map.
This route follows the lovers from Tristan's drowned homeland to Dublin, Cornwall and Brittany, ending on the island that carries his name. Almost every site is a tradition rather than a fact, so each pin says how sure it is.
In May 1804 William Clark and about 30 others left a winter camp on the Mississippi and turned up the Missouri, the first stage of an expedition sent to cross the newly acquired western part of the country. Captains Meriwether Lewis and Clark kept journals, and many of their entries are quoted here in their own spelling.
The route follows them from Camp Dubois past a sergeant's grave, a tense standoff with the Teton Sioux, a winter at Fort Mandan, the Great Falls, the Continental Divide and the snowbound Lolo Trail to the Pacific, then home by way of Clark's signature on Pompeys Pillar. Where a camp is lost to the river or to time, the pin marks the nearest place you can visit.
The Travels of Marco Polo runs from Venice and Acre to Kublai Khan's Xanadu, then south to Hangzhou and home again. In 1271 a seventeen-year-old Venetian set out with his father and uncle and did not come home for 24 years.
The route follows the book from Venice and Acre to the Persian Gulf, across the Pamir highlands and the desert to Kublai's summer and winter capitals, south to Hangzhou and the port of Zayton, and home again. Some of the roads are reconstructed by scholars, and Polo sometimes exaggerates, so each stop notes where the evidence is thin.
Where The Talented Mr. Ripley was filmed: Ischia Ponte and Procida stand in for Mongibello, Anzio plays San Remo, and Marge voices her suspicions at Caffè Florian in Venice. Tom Ripley is paid $1,000 to bring Dickie Greenleaf home, and a seaside friendship becomes a trail of lies and killings.
The route follows the film's order through Ischia and Procida, Anzio, Naples, Rome and Venice. Many places play other places: Ischia and Procida stand in for the fictional village of Mongibello, Anzio plays San Remo, and the "Roman" opera house is in Naples.
Angels & Demons, Ron Howard's 2009 film, is set across Rome: the Pantheon, Santa Maria del Popolo, Piazza Navona and Castel Sant'Angelo. Four cardinals are kidnapped, one dies each hour on the Path of Illumination, and Robert Langdon must stop antimatter from destroying the Vatican at midnight.
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.
Greece, 431 BC: Athens and Sparta are tearing the Greek world apart, and you are a Spartan mercenary caught between them. Assassin's Creed Odyssey sends you across the Aegean with a broken spear and an eagle at your side, hunting your lost family and the masked Cult of Kosmos that destroyed it.
This route follows the Eagle Bearer's trail from the hot gates of Thermopylae to the oracle at Delphi, the Acropolis of Athens, the sanctuary at Olympia, warrior Sparta and finally Mount Taygetos. Every stop is a real place you can visit, recreated in the game's vast open world.
In December 1831 a 22-year-old Cambridge graduate with a passion for beetles and rocks sailed from Plymouth as an unpaid naturalist on HMS Beagle, a ten-gun survey brig. The voyage was meant to take two years and took five. Charles Darwin came home with crates of fossils, skins and notebooks — and with questions about the islands that would lead him, two decades later, to On the Origin of Species.
The route follows the ship around the world in order, using Darwin's own Journal of Researches for dates and details: the volcanic Cape Verde islands, the Brazilian forest, the fossil beds of Argentina, Tierra del Fuego, a great Chilean earthquake, the Galápagos, Cape Town and home to Falmouth.
In 1961 the Freedom Riders took two buses from Washington, D.C. through Rock Hill, Anniston, Birmingham and Montgomery to Jackson, Mississippi, to test the Supreme Court's ruling against segregated bus terminals. In Alabama a mob burned a bus while police looked away; hundreds more riders ended up in Mississippi's jails and Parchman Farm.
The route follows the rides through the places where it happened, several of them now museums and part of a National Monument.
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.
