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 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.
Shakespeare's Macbeth is set in Scotland, from a heath near Forres and Glamis Castle to Dunsinane Hill. Its thane titles, coronation and a marching wood all belong to real names on the map. The real Macbeth ruled from 1040 to 1057, and the play takes liberties with him.
The route follows the story from the witches' prophecy to the final duel, through Glamis, Cawdor, Scone, the Birnam Oak and Dunsinane. Several places carry the play's names without staging its scenes, and each stop says so.
10 Things I Hate About You is set at Padua High School in the Seattle area, but it was shot in Tacoma and Seattle in summer 1998: Stadium High School and its Stadium Bowl, Kerry Park, the Fremont Troll and Gas Works Park.
This route follows the film's order, from the skyline in the opening credits to the paintball date. Most of the stops are public places you can still walk into.
In December 1933, eighteen-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the Hook of Holland to walk to Constantinople, carrying a few clothes, some letters of introduction, an anthology of English verse and a volume of Horace. He slept in barns and shepherds' huts, but gentry and aristocracy kept inviting him into their country houses. He wrote the journey up decades later in A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water and The Broken Road.
The route follows him through ten places the sources let us pin, from the Hook and a Stuttgart apartment to Melk, Vienna, Prague, the bridge into Hungary, an island on the Danube that now lies under water, Plovdiv and Istanbul. Many pins are approximate: the sources name a town, not the exact spot where he stood.
In June 1995 Cheryl Strayed, 26 and with no hiking experience, set out alone to walk 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. Her memoir Wild reached No. 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list, and Reese Witherspoon played her in the 2014 film.
This route follows the hike north from the Mojave Desert to the Columbia River, using the memoir's outline and the film's best-known scenes. The film compresses and dramatises, so stops drawn from it say so, and pins mark areas rather than campsites.
Hemingway wrote A Moveable Feast about his poor, happy early years in 1920s Paris, working from notebooks he had left in trunks at the Ritz in 1928. It was published in 1964, after his death.
This route walks the memoir's Paris: the flat on the rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, Gertrude Stein's salon, Sylvia Beach's bookshop, the cafés of Montparnasse and Saint-Germain, and the Ritz where the notebooks resurfaced. Hemingway himself said the book may be read as imagination, so treat its scenes as a memory, not a record.
Nine years after a night in Vienna, Jesse is on a book tour in Europe when Céline walks into his reading in a Paris bookshop. He has an hour before his flight, and they spend it wandering the city. Richard Linklater's 2004 film plays in real time: the story lasts about as long as the film, roughly eighty minutes.
It was shot in 15 days across Paris, and its locations jump about more than the dialogue admits. This route follows the film's order from the Left Bank bookshop through the Marais and the east of the city to the Seine and a gated courtyard in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.
James Joyce's Ulysses is one ordinary day, 16 June 1904, in Dublin, told in eighteen episodes through Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertisement canvasser, and Stephen Dedalus, who starts the day in a tower by the sea. This route walks the day in the order the novel runs it: from the Martello tower at Sandycove where it opens to Howth Head, where Molly Bloom's memory ends it with a yes.
Almost every stop is a place you can still stand in: the tower where Joyce stayed in 1904, the strand Stephen walks, the street of the chemist's where Bloom buys soap, the cemetery of the funeral, the pub where he eats his sandwich, the library where he passes between Stephen and Mulligan, the quay of the Ormond Hotel and the maternity hospital. The last stop is a recollection rather than a setting: the novel never says where on Howth Head the two of them lay.
Mrs Dalloway unfolds in one June day across Westminster, St James's Park, Piccadilly's Hatchards bookshop and Regent's Park. Big Ben marks the hours for Clarissa, preparing her party, and for Septimus, a war veteran; the two never meet.
This route follows the characters through the London they walk, almost all of it still standing. The Dalloways' house, the florist and the doctors are fictional.
