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.
Catherine the Great was born in Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland), crowned in the Moscow Kremlin and lived at Oranienbaum, the Winter Palace and Tsarskoye Selo near Saint Petersburg.
The route follows the German princess from her birth in 1729 through the 1762 coup and her coronation to her English garden and the Bronze Horseman statue she commissioned. Birthplace sources differ, so the first pin is approximate.
The Via Francigena is the medieval pilgrim road from Canterbury Cathedral through France and Switzerland to St Peter's in Rome, recorded by Archbishop Sigeric around 990. This route follows it from Canterbury over the Great St Bernard Pass to Lucca, Siena and Viterbo.
Sigeric's return trip ran to 80 stages of about 20 km each, some 1,700 km in all. Pilgrims still walk it today. Stops are landmarks on the route, not proven overnight stays.
St Petersburg's history can be walked in an afternoon: from the Peter and Paul Fortress, where the city was founded in 1703, past Kazan Cathedral on Nevsky Prospect to Senate Square, Palace Square and the cruiser Aurora on the Neva.
Seven stops follow the city from its foundation through the Decembrist revolt of 1825, the assassination of Alexander II, Bloody Sunday in 1905 and the events of October 1917. The stops zigzag across the centre, so the pins are markers rather than a single line.
Vincent van Gogh was born in Zundert in the Dutch province of North Brabant and died in Auvers-sur-Oise. In between came Nuenen, Antwerp, the Yellow House in Arles and the asylum at Saint-Rémy.
This route follows six places in his life, from the birthplace on the Markt to the attic room at the Auberge Ravoux. Some are gone or only approximate, and each stop says so.
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.
Vitus Bering's Kamchatka expeditions went from Saint Petersburg through Tobolsk and Okhotsk to the Bering Strait and Bering Island. In 1725 the Russian naval captain set out across a continent to find out whether Asia and America were joined.
The route follows seven places from the Tsar's order in Saint Petersburg to Bering's death on an uninhabited island in 1741. The stops are not one continuous line, so they are shown as separate markers. Dates are Old Style (Julian), as Russian records of the time kept them; the modern calendar runs 11 days ahead.
In 1613 a samurai from Sendai set out to Mexico in a galleon built for the mission to meet the King of Spain and the Pope. Hasekura Tsunenaga's embassy took seven years, crossed Mexico and the ocean, and came home to a Japan that was closing its doors to Christianity.
The route follows him from the port of Tsukinoura through Acapulco, Mexico City, Havana, Madrid, Saint-Tropez and Rome, then back via Manila to Nagasaki. Japanese dates are given in the Gregorian calendar. Most pins mark towns or harbours, not documented buildings.
Hemingway wrote A Moveable Feast about his poor, happy early years in 1920s Paris, working from notebooks he had left in trunks at the Ritz in 1928. It was published in 1964, after his death.
This route walks the memoir's Paris: the flat on the rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, Gertrude Stein's salon, Sylvia Beach's bookshop, the cafés of Montparnasse and Saint-Germain, and the Ritz where the notebooks resurfaced. Hemingway himself said the book may be read as imagination, so treat its scenes as a memory, not a record.
Gil Pender is a screenwriter with a nostalgia problem, in Paris with a fiancée and her wealthy parents. Every night at midnight a 1920s car pulls up and carries him back to the 1920s, among the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway and the surrealists. By day he is stuck in 2010.
This route follows the film from Monet's garden at Giverny to Pont Alexandre III, with the stops placed from a film-locations guide: where the 1920s scenes are shot you can still sit, eat and shop today. The party and flea-market scenes are approximate.
