The Innocents Abroad: Twain's Quaker City Cruise

The excursion was due to leave on 8 June 1867, and the ship's pier lay at the foot of Wall Street. Twain found a gloomy send-off: passengers "moping about in a drizzling rain", then "two very mild cheers" from the dripping crowd as the Quaker City cast off. A storm outside kept the ship at anchor in the harbor, and the first evening ended with a prayer meeting. The pin marks today's Pier 11/Wall Street, where ferries and excursion boats still leave from the East River.

Location precision: The book puts the ship's pier at the foot of Wall Street but names no exact berth; the pin marks the modern Pier 11/Wall Street ferry terminal.

Visitor guidance: Pier 11/Wall Street is a working ferry and excursion-boat terminal on the East River, just south of Wall Street.

A storm sent the ship to the nearest island of the Azores, and it anchored in the roadstead of Horta, half a mile from shore. Ashore, it takes a thousand reis to make a dollar. Blucher, who had invited nine of the party to dinner at the principal hotel, was handed a bill for 21,700 reis and offered a hundred and fifty dollars in protest, until the landlord returned with it translated: $21.70. Then came a donkey ride with muleteers shouting "Sekki-yah!" Twain called the town "miracles of cleanliness".

Location precision: Twain walks Horta's main street and rides into the hills without naming spots, so the pin marks the town.

Visitor guidance: Horta's marina is a stop for transatlantic yachts, and its walls and walkways are covered with paintings by visiting crews.

Part of the party went off through Spain, but Twain's group wanted "something thoroughly and uncompromisingly foreign" and found it in Tangier. He describes a packed city inside a stone wall "more than a thousand years old", streets so narrow that a man could blockade most of them with his body, and stores the size of "an ordinary shower bath". Jack came back from a money-changer having "bought eleven quarts of coin". Twain also names the cave of Hercules at Cape Spartel, which still exists.

Location precision: Twain describes the whole walled town rather than one spot; the pin marks the Petit Socco, the central square of the medina's lower town.

Visitor guidance: The medina is still a working old town; its trades today are leather, wood and silver work, clothing and shoes.

Twain's fellow passengers were "dying to see the renowned cathedral", and when Milan came into view "a forest of graceful needles" rose above the rooftops. He gave a whole chapter to it, calling it "an anthem sung in stone, a poem wrought in marble". A sacristan sent them up 182 steps to the roof, where every hollow spire held marble statues looking out on the world below. Building began in 1386 and the last details were finished only in 1965, so Twain saw it unfinished.

Visitor guidance: The roof is open to visitors for a fee.

Greek quarantine rules would have held the ship for eleven days, so at eleven at night four passengers, Twain among them, stole ashore. The gate to the temples was locked, and an attempt on a bastion ended in a crash and a retreat. Then the garrison of four Greeks turned out and admitted them, and by moonlight they saw "the noblest ruins we had ever looked upon". The night march ran thirteen miles and ended dodging a police boat. Twain joked that, left alone five minutes longer, they would have taken the citadel as Xerxes did in 480 BC.

Visitor guidance: The Acropolis Museum stands on the southern slope of the rock, 280 metres from the Parthenon.

At Yalta the passengers learned from their consul that he "had never seen a court reception", and that "a universal, delighted, enthusiastic smile ought to break out like a rash". They drove out three miles to the Emperor's palace garden, where the imperial family came out "bowing and smiling". Twain notes the Emperor's plain white clothes, an address received "with unflinching fortitude", and a tour of the house given by the family themselves, who then "proceeded to count the spoons". Livadia became an imperial summer residence in the 1860s, and Alexander II often stayed there.

Location precision: Twain never names the palace and says only that they drove out three miles; the pin marks the Livadia Palace, now a museum on the imperial summer estate of the 1860s.

Pilgrims naturally went first to the Holy Sepulchre, and so did Twain's party. He saw a few guards posted because Christians of different sects might quarrel, even fight, in the church. The tomb chamber is small, "only about six feet by seven", its marble slab worn by pilgrims' lips and some fifty gold and silver lamps hanging over it. Twain found much of the decoration tawdry, but ended with the verdict that the church is "still grand, revered, venerable". The sects still share the church under the Status Quo of 1757.

Visitor guidance: The church is open to pilgrims and visitors, and entrance is generally free.

At Giza each side of the Great Pyramid is "a wide stairway", and Arab guides hauled the passengers up with a hand on each arm. From the top Twain saw the Sphinx looking out "as placidly and pensively" as ever, and up close found it "stone, but it seemed sentient". He guessed it a hundred and twenty-five feet long, "if I remember rightly", and called it Egyptian granite. It is limestone, 73 m (240 ft) long. When a fellow passenger started tapping at its jaw, he wrote that it had "nothing to fear from the tack-hammers of ignorant excursionists".

Visitor guidance: The Sphinx faces east on the Giza Plateau, on the west bank of the Nile.