The Battle of Britain was fought over south-east England in 1940, and its places are still there: Dover, RAF Biggin Hill, RAF Kenley, RAF Hornchurch, RAF Tangmere and the underground Uxbridge bunker.
The route follows the summer of 1940 from the Dunkirk headquarters at Dover Castle through the Kent and Sussex fighter fields, which were bombed in August, to the operations room where Churchill watched 15 September. Many sites are now museums, parks or airports.
Tchaikovsky's life runs from his birthplace in Votkinsk through the School of Jurisprudence, the Saint Petersburg and Moscow conservatories, the Mariinsky Theatre and his house in Klin to his grave in Tikhvin Cemetery. Most of these places can still be visited.
The route follows the composer from his birth on 7 May 1840 to his death on 6 November 1893: childhood in Udmurtia, a civil-service training he gave up, music school, two opera premieres and the last symphony. The cause of his death is still debated, and the final stop says so.
Anne Frank wrote her diary in the Secret Annex at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam, within sight of the Westerkerk tower. The route starts at the family's flat on the Merwedeplein, where she got the diary on her thirteenth birthday in 1942.
It follows the family from the Annex through the arrest of 4 August 1944 to Westerbork, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen, where Anne died in early 1945.
The Shawshank Redemption was filmed mostly in Ohio: Shawshank State Prison is the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, the opening trial is the Wyandot County Courthouse in Upper Sandusky, and the final beach is on Saint Croix.
The route follows Andy Dufresne from his trial to the Mansfield prison, the woodshop where Red hears Figaro, Brooks's halfway house and the Caribbean beach that stands in for Zihuatanejo.
Battlefield V sends you to Narvik in Norway, Tobruk in Libya, Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, Rjukan in Norway and the Nijmegen railway bridge in the Netherlands, all real places of the war.
The game's prologue jumps between fronts, and the "Nordlys" war story follows a Norwegian resistance fight over heavy water. This route lines up those settings with the real history of each place. Only the places named in the game's own plot summary are included.
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault follows Lieutenant Mike Powell from Arzew in Algeria and Trondheim in Norway to the D-Day landing on Omaha Beach, then on to Carentan and Brest in France.
This route pins the real places named in the single-player plot. The game's own levels are not mapped to exact sites, so most stops are approximate.
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.
The Salem witch trials of 1692 began in Salem Village (now Danvers), reached the Witch House and Proctor's Ledge in Salem, and are remembered today at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead and the Salem memorial. More than 200 people were accused, thirty were found guilty and nineteen were hanged.
This route follows the story from the Parris household and the Nurse farm to the magistrate's house, the execution site and the 1992 memorial park. The Parsonage stop is approximate and has no map pin.
John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath follows the Joad family from a repossessed farm near Sallisaw, Oklahoma, along Route 66 through Needles to Weedpatch Camp in California. Tom Joad starts the story at McAlester prison.
This route follows that migration in five stops, from the prison gates to a New Deal camp south of Bakersfield. The Santa Rosa stop is tied to the 1940 film rather than the book.
Braveheart's Scotland is partly the real thing and partly Ireland: Wallace's village of Lanark was built in Glen Nevis, but York is Trim Castle, Stirling Bridge was staged on the Curragh and Longshanks' court is Bective Abbey.
The route follows seven filming locations in the order of the story, from the Highland glen to the Irish fields, lakes and ruins that stood in for the battles and castles. Most of the shoot moved to Ireland at short notice, so the film's map is split between two countries.
The Boy's Word: Blood on the Asphalt is set in Kazan but was filmed in Yaroslavl; its story comes from the real Kazan phenomenon of teenage gangs in Sukonnaya Sloboda, Privolzhsky District, Novo-Tatarskaya Sloboda and Sotsgorod.
The route follows the real history behind the 2023 series, from street fights in the 1940s to the 1978 motorcycle run, then to Naberezhnye Chelny and Yaroslavl, where the series was cast and shot. The series invents its gang territories, so all pins are approximate.
Sean Devlin, an Irish race car driver, joins the French Resistance after the Nazis murder his best friend and turn occupied Paris black and white. Pandemic Studios' 2009 open-world game sends him across the city's landmarks on a campaign of sabotage and revenge, hunting the SS commander Kurt Dierker.
The five stops follow the landmarks the story uses, from the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Élysées to Notre-Dame, the Catacombs and the Eiffel Tower. Each carries the real occupation history of the site between 1940 and 1944, and what a visitor finds there today.
In 1939 the Austrian climber Heinrich Harrer went to the Himalaya, and the war turned the trip into a walk to Lhasa. Harrer's memoir Seven Years in Tibet follows his escape from a British camp in India and his walk to Lhasa, where he became tutor to the 14th Dalai Lama.
This route covers six places from Nanga Parbat to the Potala Palace. The 1997 film was shot largely in Argentina, not Tibet, so none of its sets are stops here.
Grigory Melekhov loves another man's wife, goes to war, and changes sides in the Civil War four times. Sholokhov's novel of the Don Cossacks grew out of the Upper Don, and its landscape is still there.
The route moves from the invented hamlet of Tatarsky to Vyoshenskaya, the stanitsa of the 1919 uprising, then to the villages where Sholokhov lived and wrote. Tatarsky and the monument are marked approximately.
Amelia Earhart's last flight, 1937: from Oakland and Pearl Harbor to Miami, Lae in New Guinea and Howland Island, which she never reached, and on to Nikumaroro, where one theory says she came down. A crash in Hawaii and a lost radio signal made it one of history's great mysteries.
The route follows both attempts, from Oakland and Pearl Harbor to Miami, Lae and Howland Island, and ends at Nikumaroro, where one theory says she and her navigator came down. That final stop is only a hypothesis.
The Kojiki, Japan's oldest surviving book, sets its myths in real places: Izumo, which yielded the land, the cave at Takachiho where Amaterasu hid, Kirishima, one candidate for her grandson's descent, and Ise, said to keep her mirror.
This route follows that story to seven places, from Izumo to Takachiho, Kirishima and Ise. The myth is what the text tells; the shrine foundings and excavations are documented history, and each stop keeps the two apart. Several sites are traditional identifications that rival places also claim.
L.A. Noire rebuilds Los Angeles in 1947 with fanatical care: the studio mapped the real streets, modelled building interiors on the originals, and filled the map with the city's landmarks. Detective Cole Phelps drives that recreation through traffic, homicide, vice and arson cases, and much of the city he moves through is still standing.
This tour follows the real places behind the game's map, from Union Station and Bunker Hill to Wilshire's art deco and the Hollywood movie palaces, then down to the river where the story ends. Every pin marks a real site the game put on its streets.
J. Robert Oppenheimer studies in Cambridge and Göttingen, builds a physics school at Berkeley, and is handed the one job nobody else wants: build the atomic bomb before the Nazis do. Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer (2023) follows him from the Cavendish Laboratory to a secret mesa in New Mexico, through the Trinity test and the political fallout that ends his career.
This route follows the film's real places — Cambridge, Göttingen, LeConte Hall, Los Alamos, Trinity, the White House, the Institute for Advanced Study and the room where his security clearance was revoked. The film's own stand-ins, from Ghost Ranch to Kerckhoff Hall, Belen and Alhambra, are noted at each stop.
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.
In April 1947 the Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl and five companions pushed off from Peru on a raft of nine balsa logs, built in the style of old Spanish drawings of South American rafts. They meant to prove that ancient people could have drifted from South America to Polynesia. After 101 days and almost 7,000 kilometres on the open Pacific, they crashed onto a coral reef in the Tuamotus — and all six walked ashore.
The voyage became a bestselling book and an Oscar-winning documentary. Heyerdahl's theory, though, has not survived: archaeology, language and genetics show that Polynesians came from the west, from Island Southeast Asia, as master navigators. The route follows the raft from Callao to Tahiti.
Barcelona, 1945. A bookseller leads his ten-year-old son Daniel through a dark alley off the Ramblas to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a secret library where every child may adopt one book. Daniel chooses a novel by Julián Carax — and discovers that someone has spent years hunting down and burning every other copy.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón's 2001 bestseller is a love letter to the old city, and its mystery runs through real streets: the Ramblas, the Gothic Quarter, the Ribera, Tibidabo and Montjuïc. The library, the bookshop, the hospice and the Aldaya mansion are invented, so those pins mark the streets where Zafón put them; the café, squares and castle are real and open to visitors.
Between 1947 and 1950 Sal Paradise, a young writer from New Jersey, crosses America again and again — hitchhiking, by bus and in borrowed cars — usually in pursuit of his wild, magnetic friend Dean Moriarty. Jack Kerouac typed the story on a continuous scroll of paper in three weeks in April 1951, and it was published in 1957. Sal is Kerouac, Dean is Neal Cassady, and most of the trips really happened.
The route picks out the places the novel names, from a rainy false start on the Hudson to Mexico City and back to a New York street corner. The novel gives towns and streets rather than addresses, so most pins mark areas, not doors.
