Catalog
The Italian Job (1969) is set in Turin, with the Great St Bernard Pass, Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin and the Nivolet Pass among its real filming places. The story is a gold heist in traffic-jammed Turin. This route follows it from the Alps through London and Dublin to the Museo Egizio, Lingotto and the final bus on a mountain road. Some scenes were filmed far from where the story puts them.
Nelson Mandela's life runs from a Mbashe River village to the lawns of the Union Buildings in Pretoria, with stops at Fort Hare, Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, Robben Island and Victor Verster Prison along the way. The route follows him from his birth in Mvezo on 18 July 1918 through student days, underground work, years in prison and his inauguration as South Africa's first democratically elected president on 10 May 1994. Most stops can be visited; the pins at Mvezo and Qunu mark the villages, not a single building.
Detroit: Become Human is set in a near-future Detroit, 2038, where androids work and revolt among real landmarks like the Spirit of Detroit, the Monument to Joe Louis and Belle Isle. The route follows six places where the game meets the real city, from downtown sculptures and Eastern Market murals to the suburb of Ferndale, the Packard plant and Belle Isle. The game is an approximation, not a recreation, so several stops are marked approximate or fictional.
In 1805 the frigate HMS Surprise is hammered by a French privateer off Brazil, and her captain will not go home. The chase runs south round Cape Horn to the Galápagos, with a ship's surgeon who only wants to look at birds. The route follows the film's voyage, then the places where it was actually made: a giant tank in Mexico and the replica ship in San Diego. It covers the 2003 film, not Patrick O'Brian's novels, and the sea stops are left unpinned.
Pushkin's novel in verse follows a bored St. Petersburg dandy who inherits a country estate, rejects a girl's love letter, kills his friend in a duel, and years later finds her transformed into the star of Petersburg society. The route runs from the capital's garden walks to the road into Moscow and the exile estate where he wrote part of the book. Most places in the verse are glimpsed rather than described, so several pins are approximate or stand-ins.
Two girls grow up in a poor Naples neighbourhood in the 1950s, one pushed on by school, the other by sheer brilliance. Elena Ferrante's four Neapolitan Novels follow their friendship from a doll thrown down a cellar chute to a package in the mail in 2010. The route runs from the district of the first book through Ischia, Pisa, San Giovanni a Teduccio and Florence to Turin. The books never name the streets, so most pins mark areas, not buildings.
In 1819 Bolívar led an army from the flooded Llanos over the Páramo de Pisba, a pass 3,960 metres high that had been left unguarded because it seemed impassable. Weeks later he won at Boyacá and entered Santa Fe. The route follows him from the Congress of Angostura through the freezing crossing, the standoff at Gámeza and the lancers' charge at Vargas Swamp to the Boyacá bridge and the capital. Several stops are approximate, since the sources name regions rather than exact spots.
The Kanto of Pokémon Red and Blue is based on the real Kantō region of Japan: fans match Pallet Town to Machida, Vermilion City to Yokohama, Celadon City to Shinjuku and Lavender Town to Narita. You start in a quiet town, beat eight gym leaders and take on Team Rocket. This route follows the game's journey from Pallet Town to the final gym and sets each stop beside the real place it is said to resemble. The game's Kanto is inspired by the real one, not a copy of it, so every pin is an outside reading of the map, not an official location.
In March 1976 a film crew came to southern Tunisia and turned it into another planet. George Lucas had selected Tunisia to provide the desert planet setting for Star Wars, and filming in Tunisia began on March 22, 1976: a troglodyte hotel became the Lars homestead, the salt flats became a moisture farm, and the streets of Ajim on Djerba became the Mos Eisley spaceport. When the prequels called, the crews came back: locations at Onk Jemal in Tozeur, Ksar Ouled Soltane and Ksar Hadada were used for Tatooine scenes in the 1998 shoot, from the Boonta Eve podrace track to the slave quarters where the boy Anakin lived. Abandoned sets for the filming have been left in the desert but can be visited — this route links all eight sites, from the droids' landing dunes to the granary-courtyard slave quarters.
On the evening of 2 October 1872, the punctual and unflappable Phileas Fogg bets his fellow members of the Reform Club £20,000 — half his fortune — that he can go around the world in eighty days, and leaves that same night with his new French valet, Passepartout. On his heels comes Detective Fix, convinced that Fogg is a bank robber on the run. Jules Verne's novel appeared in 1872, when the opening of the Suez Canal and new railways across India and America had made such a race against the timetable just about possible. The route follows the journey eastward in the novel's own dates, from Pall Mall back to Pall Mall.
Nellie Bly's 1889 record run began at a Hoboken pier, detoured to Jules Verne's house in Amiens, and crossed America by special train from San Francisco. The New York World reporter set out to turn Around the World in Eighty Days into fact and beat Phileas Fogg's record in 72 days, 6 hours and 11 minutes. The route follows her book of 1890, stop by stop, with the dates from her own record. She went east by steamer and train, through the Suez Canal and the British ports of Asia.
In 218 BC the Carthaginian general Hannibal set out from Spain to attack Rome by the one route the Romans never expected: overland, across the Pyrenees, the Rhône and the Alps, with tens of thousands of soldiers, horses and 37 war elephants. Five months later he came down into the plain of the Po with a battered but unbeaten army, and within weeks had won his first two victories in Italy. The route follows the march as told by the Greek historian Polybius, who wrote about seventy years later and walked the Alpine route himself. Nobody knows for certain where Hannibal crossed the Rhône or which pass he used, so several pins are marked speculative.