Bella Swan moves to the rainiest corner of Washington and falls for a vampire. Stephenie Meyer picked the town of Forks by searching for rainy places, and the story then carries Bella and Edward from the Olympic Peninsula to the clock tower of Volterra in Tuscany.
The route follows the first two novels from Forks through La Push and Port Angeles to Volterra, and ends in Montepulciano, the town that played Volterra in the film. The pins mark towns, not buildings.
Anne Shirley, a talkative red-haired orphan, is sent by mistake to a farm in Avonlea and wins over everyone, including the reader. Lucy Maud Montgomery's 1908 novel is hugely loved in Japan, where it is known as Red-haired Anne.
The route follows the book's real island: the village behind fictional Bolingbroke, the lake Anne renames, Green Gables itself, the woods she fears, her Charlottetown college and the window where it was written. Avonlea and the Cuthberts are invented; the pins mark the real places that inspired them.
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.
Taki, a Tokyo schoolboy who waits tables in Shinjuku, keeps waking up in the body of Mitsuha, a shrine maiden in a mountain town who has never left it. They leave notes on each other's skin, fall for each other from a distance — and then the switching stops dead. Taki rides west with two friends to find the town he can only draw from memory, and finds it gone: a fragment of a comet took Itomori and five hundred people three years before his visit.
The town was invented, but the film stands on real ground: the Shinjuku where Taki lives and works, the Hida valley that lent Itomori its backdrop, the lake generally credited with the crater pool, and the stone staircase where the story ends. One caveat: Itomori was never filmed, so its crater is the one stop here without a pin.
A young English solicitor travels to the Carpathians to sell a London house to a nobleman — and becomes his prisoner. The Count then ships himself to England in fifty boxes of earth, comes ashore in a Yorkshire storm and starts hunting in London, until a small band led by Professor Van Helsing chases him all the way back to his mountains.
Stoker never visited Transylvania; he built its geography from books and maps, and the English half from places he knew. The route follows the novel's diaries and letters stop by stop: the inn at Bistritz, the Borgo Pass, the Black Sea port of Varna, the harbour, steps and churchyard of Whitby, Purfleet on the Thames, London Zoo and the final race up the Danube at Galatz.
