Catalog
Marie Curie's life runs from her birthplace on Freta Street in Warsaw to the Latin Quarter, the Radium Institute and the Panthéon in Paris. This route follows the places where Maria Skłodowska became Marie Curie. It starts with the Flying University and a first laboratory in Warsaw, then the Sorbonne years, her 1895 wedding in Sceaux, the street where Pierre Curie died, the Musée Curie and her tomb in the Panthéon.
Call of Duty: Black Ops sends CIA operative Alex Mason from the Bay of Pigs in Cuba to the Vorkuta gulag, Baikonur Cosmodrome, Huế in Vietnam and Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong. Mason's story is told in flashbacks from an interrogation room, in order, from April 1961 to 1968. This route follows seven real places behind the campaign, and what happened at each one in real history. The game's levels are fiction, so most pins are approximate. Spoiler notice: the last stop reveals the campaign's twist.
The Silence of the Lambs is set in Virginia, Baltimore and Memphis but was filmed largely in and around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with the FBI Academy at Quantico, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall as real stops. This route follows Clarice Starling from her FBI training to Lecter's cell and the hunt for Buffalo Bill. Two sites are private or gone, so the map marks them with a caveat.
Atlantis comes from two dialogues by Plato, Timaeus and Critias, and searchers have placed it at Santorini, the Strait of Gibraltar, Spartel Bank, Doñana in Spain and the Richat Structure in Mauritania. This route starts with Plato's own frame in Sais, Egypt, then visits five of the proposed locations. Every pin after the first is a theory, not a find.
A Russian student expelled from university in 1864 ends up living among people in north-eastern New Guinea who had never seen a European. Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay was a zoologist and anthropologist, an early follower of Darwin who refuted the view that human races were different species. The route follows him from Haeckel's Jena and the Canary Islands to Astrolabe Bay, the Sydney research station he founded, and his grave in St Petersburg. Most pins are approximate: the sources name regions, not camps.
The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games send scavengers called stalkers through the Zone, a radioactive wasteland built from the real Chernobyl exclusion zone. The developers copied bridges, railways and buildings from photographs and visits, then bent the geography for gameplay. This route goes from the edge of the Zone to the reactor, setting each game location beside its real counterpart. The real zone is restricted and trespassers are prosecuted, so this is a map to read, not a trip to plan.
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.