The German Fairy Tale Route runs from Hanau, where the Brothers Grimm were born, to Sababurg, nicknamed Sleeping Beauty Castle, the Pied Piper's Hamelin and the Musicians' Statue in Bremen. The brothers grew up poor, studied law and became librarians.
The route follows the Fairy Tale Route from Hanau, where they were born, through the places they lived and worked, to Sleeping Beauty's castle and the Pied Piper's Hamelin, ending in Bremen with the animals' statue. The tale places are traditional associations, not the Grimms' own claims.
A boy born in Eisleben becomes a monk, a professor and the man who defied an emperor. Along the way he vows in a thunderstorm, challenges the church over indulgences, is spirited away in disguise and ends his life where it began.
The route follows Luther through seven places in Germany: his birth house, the Erfurt monastery, the Wittenberg church doors, the Diet of Worms, the Wartburg, his Wittenberg home and the house where he died. The Worms pin is approximate, and the Castle Church doors story is tradition.
A few hundred Cossacks, a Stroganov fortress on the Kama and a khan's capital on the Irtysh: in four years Yermak turned a raid into the Russian entry into Siberia.
The route follows the campaign from Orel-gorodok over the Urals to the battle at Chuvash Cape, the fall of Qashliq, Yermak's death at the Vagay and the founding of Tobolsk. Dates differ between chronicles and modern sources, and the sources mark the death site and the legends as uncertain; the notes at each stop say which.
In 1893 Fridtjof Nansen froze a purpose-built ship into the Arctic ice on purpose. His bet was that the pack would carry it across the top of the world, and the sceptics called it self-destruction.
This route follows the voyage from Vardø to the pack ice, the drift, the sledge dash to 86°14′N, a hard winter in a stone hut and a lucky meeting at Cape Flora, ending at the museum where the ship rests. Ocean and ice stops have no map pin.
Cut off from the rest of the country, Leningrad lived through the winter of 1941–42 on 125 grams of bread a day, half of it sawdust. This route follows the siege through the places that carried the city through: a fortress island, an ice road, a seed bank, a diary, a symphony.
It runs from the first day of the encirclement to the memorials that came after, and keeps to documented facts. Several stops are memorials: please visit with respect.
Before The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry flew the mail. He flew the Aéropostale line from Toulouse, ran the Cape Juby airfield, directed an airline in Buenos Aires and survived a crash in the Sahara that later fed his most famous book.
The route follows his life in the air, from the take-off strip at Montaudran to the sea off Marseille where his plane was found. The Sahara crash site is only an educated guess.
Three provincial girls, a dormitory and a city that does not believe in tears: the Oscar-winning Soviet melodrama follows Katerina from a borrowed high-rise flat in 1958 to the director's chair twenty years later.
The route visits the places the film was shot or set, from the Kudrinskaya tower and Gogol Boulevard to the Klin factory and the round house of the final credits. Most pins mark the shooting location, not a scene's exact spot.
Dante wrote the Divine Comedy while banished from Florence. This route follows both the man and the people he put in the poem who were real: Francesca, Ugolino and Pia.
It runs from the Baptistery and the sentence of 1302, through the places tied to the poem's souls and the court of Verona, to Ravenna, where he died in 1321, and the empty tomb Florence built for him.
Two Dickens novels, one city of thieves' dens, prisons and cramped lodgings. Oliver Twist is dragged into Fagin's gang in the lanes of Holborn, while Pip of Great Expectations arrives from the Kent marshes expecting a soft white city and finds filth.
The route follows Oliver and Nancy from Saffron Hill to London Bridge, Jacob's Island and Newgate, then Pip from Cooling churchyard through Rochester to Little Britain and Barnard's Inn. Several places are traditional models rather than named settings, and each pin says so.
Sadko is a poor gusli player from Novgorod whose music wins the favour of the Sea Tsar, a golden fish and a fortune, until the sea demands payment. The story is best known abroad through Rimsky-Korsakov's opera.
The route follows the tale through the real geography it grew from: the merchants' market, Lake Ilmen, the Volkhov trade route, the river's source, and the Novgorod church of the man Sadko may be based on. None of the places is named exactly in the tale, so all pins are approximate.
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.
Assassin's Creed Mirage is set in 9th-century Baghdad, with the Round City and the House of Wisdom, and stops at Anbar, Alamut and al-Ula. Street thief Basim Ibn Ishaq becomes a Hidden One hunting the Order of the Ancients amid the Anarchy at Samarra.
The route follows him from the ruined town of Anbar to the mountain fortress of Alamut, through the districts of Baghdad and on to the oasis of al-Ula. Little of the Round City survives and the House of Wisdom is gone, so those pins are approximate; the Iraqi stops are for reading, not visiting.
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.
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.
In the summer of 1935 the young Laurie Lee left London for Spain with a violin and a single Spanish phrase. For a year he walked and played his way from Galicia to the Andalusian coast, sleeping under the open sky or in cheap posadas, welcomed even by the poorest villagers.
The route follows his memoir from Vigo through Zamora, Toledo, Tarifa and Málaga to Almuñécar, where he was rescued by a British destroyer as the Spanish Civil War began. Pins mark towns, not the roads he actually walked.
In 1973 Paul Theroux set out from London Victoria on a four-month railway loop through Europe, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, then came back on the Trans-Siberian Railway. His travelogue, published in 1975, became a classic of the genre.
This route follows episodes the book's reviewers single out, from the Direct-Orient Express to Istanbul, Calcutta, Burma, Vietnam and Tokyo. The book's own text could not be checked, so some pins mark a city's station rather than a scene, and some places are not safe to visit now.
Bridgerton is set in London, but most of its streets are in Bath, its parks are in Wiltshire and its family home is in Greenwich.
This route follows the filming locations from the Royal Crescent and Lady Danbury's house in Bath, through London and Kent, to the country houses that played Clyvedon and Aubrey Hall in the first two seasons.
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.
Disguised as a beggar, a Belgian-French explorer walked into the forbidden city of Lhasa among pilgrims. Alexandra David-Néel and her adopted son Yongden stayed two months in 1924, then slipped away before the governor could act.
The route follows her from Kumbum, where she studied for years, across the Kyi to the Potala and the Monlam crowds, then on to Samye, Tsetang and Gyantse. Pins are area-level, and critics have disputed her account since 1972.
In 1857 two British officers set out from Zanzibar to find the Great Lakes rumoured to lie in the centre of the continent and, they hoped, the source of the Nile. They found two lakes, and then fell out over what they had found.
The route runs from a failed Somali expedition through Zanzibar, Kazeh and Ujiji to Lake Victoria, then on to Speke's Ripon Falls and the Bath debate that never happened. All pins are approximate, as the sources name regions and towns rather than exact spots.
A failed Spanish expedition to Florida left four survivors, and one of them, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, walked and traded his way across the continent over roughly eight years before meeting Spaniards again in Mexico. He wrote his account from memory.
The route runs from Spain through Cuba, Florida and the Texas coast to Culiacán and Mexico City. Most stops are approximate, and the middle of the journey is not traced because historians cannot fix his route.
The Bourne Trilogy: Zurich's safe deposit box, the Paris car chase and Tangier's medina. A man with no memory is hunted by a CIA programme that wants him gone.
The route follows the three films in order, from Zurich and Paris through Mykonos, Berlin and Moscow to London and Tangier. Several cities were stand-ins for others, so the pins mark the story's places or honest approximations.
Anne of Green Gables is set on Prince Edward Island: Avonlea is based on Cavendish, Green Gables is an 1830s farmhouse there, and at sixteen Anne goes to Queen's Academy in Charlottetown. Lucy Maud Montgomery's 1908 novel, much loved in Japan as Red-haired Anne, sends a talkative orphan to a farm by mistake.
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.
In August 1803 two small Russian sloops sailed from Kronstadt on the first Russian voyage round the world. Adam Johann von Krusenstern led the expedition on the Nadezhda, and Yuri Lisyansky captained the Neva; the Neva was back almost three years later.
This route follows seven turning points, from the Marquesas and Kamchatka to the Tlingit fort at Sitka, the closed door of Nagasaki and the tea trade at Canton. The two ships often sailed apart, so the stops are markers, not one line. Day dates follow the main source, which gives the outward voyage in the modern (New Style) calendar; Russian logs of the time used the Old Style, so the homecoming in 1806 is given by season only. Pins mark towns and bays, not exact anchorages.
