Assassin's Creed Brotherhood: The Borgias' Rome

December 1499: Ezio leaves the Vault and escapes Rome with his uncle Mario, and the very next day Cesare Borgia's Papal Army besieges Monteriggioni. Cesare kills Mario and claims the Apple of Eden for the Templars. The town really exists and is home to Ezio and Mario in the games, though their Villa Auditore is fictional. Its roughly circular walls, about 570 metres long, were built between 1213 and 1219 along the contours of the hill.

Location precision: The Auditore villa is fictional; the pin marks the real walled town of Monteriggioni.

Visitor guidance: The main street links the town's two gates; walk it end to end inside the walls.

Rome is the center of Templar power, and Ezio takes the fight against the Borgia-led Templars here; Rodrigo and Cesare Borgia both appear as characters, and the castle features in much of the game. Hadrian first commissioned the building as a mausoleum for himself and his family. The popes later made it a fortress and castle, and Pope Nicholas III linked it to St Peter's by the covered Passetto di Borgo.

Visitor guidance: Now a museum; the Passetto di Borgo once linked it to St Peter's.

In the game Rome has fallen into ruin under the corrupt rule of the Borgia papacy, and the Pantheon stands among its recreated locations. After the original burnt down, the present building was completed by Hadrian around AD 126. Almost two thousand years later its dome is still the world's largest unreinforced concrete dome, and continuous use makes it one of the best-preserved of all ancient Roman buildings.

Visitor guidance: Step inside to stand beneath the world's largest unreinforced concrete dome.

Ezio's hunt for the Apple leads inside St Peter's Basilica: having learned its location, he retrieves it from within the church. The building he enters was soon remade, since construction of the present basilica began on 18 April 1506 and finished in 1626. Tradition holds the basilica is the burial site of Saint Peter, first Bishop of Rome, and it is famous as a place of pilgrimage and liturgy.

Visitor guidance: It is still a famous place of pilgrimage.

One mission has Ezio disrupting an assassination attempt in the ruins during a play about the death of Jesus Christ, and later he hides the Apple in a First Civilization Temple underneath the arena before leaving Italy in pursuit of Cesare. The real amphitheatre is the largest ever built, once holding an estimated 50,000 to 80,000 spectators for gladiatorial contests and public spectacles.

Visitor guidance: One of Rome's most popular tourist attractions.

In 1507 Cesare, backed by his new patron John III of Navarre, lays siege to Viana in Spain, and Ezio meets him on the battlements of a crumbling castle. Their fight ends with Ezio dropping Cesare off the battlements to his death. The real Cesare likewise recaptured Viana but not its castle, and an ambush left him with a fatal spear injury. He is buried in Viana, which lies on the French Way of the Camino de Santiago.

Location precision: The game names no exact spot on the walls; the pin marks the town whose castle Cesare besieged.

Visitor guidance: The town is on the French Way path of the Camino de Santiago.