The Seven Churches of Revelation lie in western Turkey: Ephesus near Selçuk, Smyrna, Pergamon at Bergama, Thyatira at Akhisar, Sardis, Philadelphia at Alaşehir and Laodicea near Denizli. They are the seven cities addressed in the letters of Revelation 2–3.
This pilgrimage route follows the letters in order, from Ephesus to Laodicea, and sets each message beside what stands on the ground. The sources identify some sites exactly and others only by their modern town.
Ezio Auditore da Firenze comes to Constantinople in 1511, an old Assassin chasing five keys that unlock a library sealed beneath Masyaf by Altaïr two and a half centuries earlier. The keys lie scattered across an Ottoman capital caught between the succession claims of the princes Ahmet and Selim, with Byzantine Templars working against the city; the search runs from the Galata Tower and Hagia Sophia to the palace at Topkapı, out to the Maiden's Tower in the Bosphorus and, at the end, into a stronghold of the Byzantine Templars under Cappadocia.
This route starts at Masyaf in Syria and follows Ezio through the real Istanbul of the game, the tower, church, palace and islet that can still be visited, before ending underground in Cappadocia.
Jean de Florette was filmed around Riboux, Mirabeau and Vaugines, with market scenes in Sommières, for Claude Berri's 1986 adaptation of the Provence story.
The film follows Ugolin and his uncle Papet, who plug a spring to take over a neighbour's land, and the newcomer Jean de Florette, who farms without knowing it. The route runs from the farm of Les Romarins to the village church and bench; some stops are stand-ins for the story's places.
Saint Paul's missionary journeys run from Paphos in Cyprus through Antioch of Pisidia, Philippi, Athens, Corinth and Ephesus to Malta and Rome, as told in the Acts of the Apostles.
The route follows Paul from his first journey with Barnabas to the shipwreck on Malta and his final years in Rome, with the ruins, hills and basilicas you can still visit.
Several spots, like the Areopagus and Paul's tomb, are traditional identifications, and each stop says how firm the evidence is.
Dexter is set in Miami, but only part of it was filmed there: Ocean Drive in South Beach and the waters off Virginia Key are real Miami, while Long Beach, California, plays much of the rest.
The route follows the Showtime series from the pilot's Miami street scenes to Long Beach's Villa Riviera and university campus, and ends at Ontario International Airport for the finale.
Seong Gi-hun is a divorced gambler in Seoul, broke and in debt. A smiling stranger offers him a game of ddakji on a subway platform, and soon he is playing children's games for his life. The arena is fiction: the games were built as sets at the Daejeon Expo Science Park and later dismantled, and the island exteriors come from Seongapdo, a private island that cannot be visited.
Everything around the arena is real — the market, the corner shop, the amusement park, the airport — and this route follows those places in story order, from a schoolyard in the first episode to a park where the Salesman starts recruiting again.
In 1327 a Franciscan detective and his young novice arrive at a Benedictine abbey in northern Italy, and monks begin to die. Umberto Eco's abbey is invented, but it was assembled from real places, and Jean-Jacques Annaud's 1986 film built another one from sets and a German monastery.
This route follows the borrowed pieces of the book, from the Sacra di San Michele to the portal at Moissac, then the places that played the abbey on screen. Pins for the book's models are traditional identifications, not locations named in the novel.
Clarín's novel hides Oviedo behind the name Vetusta, a provincial capital of gossip, piety and boredom where Ana Ozores, the Regenta, is slowly worn down. It begins with the Magistral watching the town through a telescope and ends with Ana fainting in his chapel.
The route follows seven scenes from the tower to the duel and the confessional, and ends at the modern statue of Ana. Spanish guides tie some scenes to real Oviedo; where they do not, the pin is approximate or absent.
In about 1986 a boy of five or six fell asleep on an empty train in central India and woke up nearly 1,500 kilometres away in Calcutta, unable to name his home town. Adopted by a couple in Tasmania, Saroo Brierley found his way back 25 years later by tracing railway lines on Google Earth. His memoir A Long Way Home became the 2016 film Lion, with Dev Patel as the grown-up Saroo and Nicole Kidman as his adoptive mother.
The route follows the real journey, which the film tells closely, from Khandwa station to Burhanpur, Howrah and Hobart, and back to Khandwa. Family homes are private and not pinned.
