Odysseus Across the Wine-Dark Sea

The poem opens on the man "who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy". With the war won through his trick of the wooden horse, Odysseus — Ulysses in Samuel Butler's translation — sets out with twelve ships. His first stop goes badly: he sacks Ismarus, the town of the Cicones in Thrace, and loses men when his crews linger to feast. Troy itself was real: the mound of Hisarlik in north-west Turkey is identified as the city and is a World Heritage Site.

Trapped in the cave of the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, who eats his men two at a time, Odysseus tells him his name is "Noman", gets him drunk and blinds him with a sharpened stake; when the Cyclops shouts that Noman is killing him, his neighbours go home. As the ships escape, the blinded giant hurls rocks after them. The geographer Strabo placed the Cyclopes in south-east Sicily near Etna, and at Aci Trezza local legend says the sea stacks offshore are the rocks he threw.

Location precision: A local tradition, not a location in the poem; the pin marks the Isole dei Ciclopi at Aci Trezza.

Aeolus, keeper of the winds, lives on a floating island "iron bound with a wall", with his six sons married to his six daughters. He entertains Odysseus for a month and sends him off with all the contrary winds tied up in a bag. Within sight of Ithaca, while Odysseus sleeps, his crew open the bag hoping for treasure, and the storm blows them all the way back. Ancient writers, Strabo among them, identified the island with Lipari, in the Aeolian Islands north of Sicily.

Location precision: An ancient identification of a mythical island; the pin marks Lipari.

After the cannibal Laestrygonians destroy every ship but his own, Odysseus lands on Aeaea, home of the enchantress Circe, who drugs his scouts and "turned them into pigs by a stroke of her wand". Protected by a herb the gods call Moly, he forces her to change them back and stays a year. She sends him to the edge of the world to consult the dead. Circe's home was later placed on Monte Circeo, a promontory on the coast south of Rome, an association that began no earlier than the late 6th century BC.

Location precision: A later tradition; the pin marks Monte Circeo.

Visitor guidance: The promontory is part of Circeo National Park, with paths up the mountain from San Felice Circeo.

Circe warns him: the Sirens "warble him to death with the sweetness of their song", sitting in a meadow among the bones of their victims. So Odysseus kneads wax, stops his men's ears and has himself bound hands and feet to the mast, the only man to hear the song and live. Strabo offered several candidates for their home, among them the headland between the Bay of Naples and the Gulf of Salerno, where the little Li Galli islands off Positano are still called Le Sirenuse.

Location precision: One of several ancient candidates; the pin marks the Li Galli islands.

Next comes a strait between two terrors: Scylla, with "six necks of the most prodigious length" and a head on each, who snatches six of his men from the deck, and Charybdis, who sucks down the sea three times a day. Odysseus steers closer to Scylla and loses six men rather than the ship. Since antiquity the pair have been placed at the Strait of Messina, between Sicily and Calabria, where a rock at the town of Scilla and a natural whirlpool in the strait carry the legend.

Location precision: The traditional identification; the pin marks the Strait of Messina.

His starving crew kill the sacred cattle of the Sun on the island of Thrinacia, and Zeus destroys their ship; only Odysseus survives, washed up on Ogygia, the island of the nymph Calypso. "I stayed with Calypso seven years straight on end," he says, weeping for home, until the gods order her to let him go on a raft. The Alexandrian poet Callimachus identified Ogygia with Gozo, in Malta, and a cave above Ramla Bay is still known as Calypso's Cave.

Location precision: An ancient identification and local tradition; the pin marks Calypso's Cave above Ramla Bay.

Shipwrecked again, Odysseus crawls ashore naked on Scheria, land of the seafaring Phaeacians. The princess Nausicaa, sent to the river by Athena to wash the household's clothes, finds him and leads him to her father's palace, where he tells the whole story of his wanderings. The Phaeacians carry him home in one of their magical ships. From Callimachus and Apollonius of Rhodes onwards, Scheria has been identified with Corfu, and the island still claims the honour.

Location precision: An ancient identification; the pin marks Corfu town.

Twenty years after leaving, Odysseus lands in Ithaca disguised as an old beggar and finds his house overrun by suitors for his wife Penelope. She sets a contest: whoever can string her husband's bow and shoot an arrow through "twelve axes" set in a row may marry her. Only the beggar can — and he turns the bow on the suitors. Homer's Ithaca is usually identified with the island of Ithaki in the Ionian Sea, though some scholars place it on Lefkada or part of Kefalonia.

Location precision: The usual identification is debated; the pin marks the island of Ithaki.