Travelling as a fan: 10 holidays where art inspired the itinerary

We’ve all been so floored by a book or a movie or a song that we’ve wished we could be in the same place. Some of our writers have followed through on this impulse, tracking a work or body of art to its setting. Whether it’s a journey to Costa Brava to soak in some Dali, or to Seoul to relive moments from a favourite K-series, here are 10 holidays where we followed our obsessions to their source.

A magical metro ride to find ProkofievMy introduction to classical music came through a slightly crackly LP of Peter and the Wolf that appeared often on the family turntable when I was a child.

In our living room orchestra, every instrument had a personality. Peter himself bounded through the music carried by bright strings that sounded like youthful mischief. A fluttering flute became the bird.

The oboe waddled along as the duck. The clarinet crept about like a suspicious cat. A bassoon grumbled its way into the role of the stern grandfather.

And when three French horns suddenly appeared with dark and menacing chords, the wolf had clearly arrived. For a child it was not merely music. It was a story unfolding through sound.

Many years later that childhood soundtrack quietly followed me all the way to Moscow. The tour schedule was organized with near military discipline, and our guide Theo issued firm advice about not wandering off alone in Moscow. The city, he explained, was far too vast and complicated for such freelance adventures.

Which of course meant I did exactly that.

I slipped away from the group, descended into the Moscow Metro and surrendered myself to one of the grandest underground railway systems on the planet. Stations glittered with chandeliers and marble columns. The platforms looked less like transport hubs and more like imperial ballrooms. Eventually I surfaced near Novodevichy Cemetery.

It is one of those cemeteries where Russian history seems to be quietly assembled in one place. Poets, revolutionaries, musicians and artists lie there among statues and sombre stone markers. And among them is Sergei Prokofiev.

There is a strange irony attached to his death. Prokofiev died on the same day as Joseph Stalin in 1953. Stalin’s funeral consumed the Soviet Union.

Prokofiev’s passing barely registered. Moscow’s florists ran out of flowers because every bouquet in the city had been commandeered for Stalin’s funeral. Standing there decades later, the imbalance felt almost corrected.

Stalin ruled through terror. Prokofiev left music that filled childhoods with imagination.

And somewhere in my head, in a small Russian village that exists only in memory, Peter is still sneaking past his grandfather and chasing a wolf through the woods. – Rishad Saam Mehta Channeling Hallyu on a beach in Gangwon-doSometime in 2018, I started watching Korean dramas while researching a story on the Hallyu wave. I wasn’t hooked from the get-go. I remember watching a few shows and wondering what the fuss was all about.

Then I stumbled on shows that clicked, like Inheritors (20

13. 1
14. and Descendants of the Sun (20
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16. Most of the dramas I enjoyed were written by screenwriter Kim Eun-sook. I looked up the rest of her work and landed on Goblin (20
17. 1
18. It’s available on Netflix under the title Guardian: The Lonely and Great God.

The show stars Gong Yoo—who later became instantly recognisable to non-K-drama audiences after his recruiter slap scene in Squid Game—in the titular role, alongside Kim Go-eun.

In September 2019, I travelled to South Korea and hoped to revisit some favourite drama locations, especially Jumunjin Beach in the Gangwon-do province on the north-east coast, where the lead characters’ first meeting unfolds, in which Gong Yoo’s Kim Shin gives Go-eun’s Ji Eun-tak a buckwheat flower bouquet at the edge of the breakwater.

It was the final item on my six-day trip to Seoul. My friend who was hosting me had already offered to drive, but work derailed those plans and she ended up pulling an all-nighter the day before. The next morning, after barely a power nap, she simply said, “We’re still going.

You can’t miss this.” When we finally got there, it felt oddly cosmic, as if the place carried the same fated energy as the scene that had drawn me to it in the first place.

Later, Kim Eun-sook wrote my all-time favourite drama across languages: The Glory (2022-23).

On my next trip there, I might try to meet her, tell her how one show she wrote over a decade ago took me to Jumunjin Beach. On the way, we stopped at a drive-through and I ate what remains the best ramen bowl of my life. On our way back, we spotted a full rainbow arc across the sky.

The kind of details, I suspect, based on her writing, she would appreciate. — Shephali BhattIn Dalí’s playground in Costa BravaSpain has been home to some of the most influential creative minds, from the paintings of Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso to the architecture of Antoni Gaudí. For Salvador Dalí, much of that inspiration came from the rugged coastline of the Costa Brava.

While planning a road trip from Barcelona, a little research and a long-held fascination with Dalí’s art led us north to Figueres, Dalí’s birthplace and home to one of Spain’s most unusual museums: the Dalí Theatre-Museum, built on the ruins of a theatre destroyed during the Spanish Civil War. Even from the outside, it’s clear that this is no conventional exhibition space. Dark pink walls are dotted with sculpted loaves of bread and crowned with enormous white eggs (one of Dalí’s favourite motifs, symbolising birth and creativity).

Above it rises a glass dome that reflects the Mediterranean light. Inside, the museum feels less like a gallery and more like stepping into Dalí’s imagination. Rooms are filled with paintings, sculptures and playful visual illusions.

Dalí himself is buried in the building, beneath the former theatre stage.

We continued eastwards toward the whitewashed fishing village of Cadaqués. Dalí spent childhood summers here. Just beyond the village lies the tiny bay of Port Lligat, where Dalí built his home and studio overlooking the cove.

Dalí lived and worked here for decades with his wife and muse, Gala. The Salvador Dalí House Museum preserves the artist’s eccentric world. Large white sculpted eggs appear again—perched on rooftops or tucked into niches, while a wall of Pirelli tyres stands beside the swimming pool.

The windows frame the calm waters of the Mediterranean. Step outside and the influence of the landscape becomes clear. The wind-carved rocks and barren headlands of nearby Cap de Creus resemble the scenery that appears in many of Dalí’s paintings, including the famous The Persistence of Memory.

Standing here, it becomes easier to see how Dalí’s imagination took shape—the landscape had already done half the work. — Udita Jhunjhunwala Following Feluda in Jaisalmer“Many years ago a Bengali director came here to make a film. Since then a lot of tourists from Bengal have come here to see the fort,” said our cab driver as we headed out of Jaisalmer airport earlier this month.