“Roman roads turn up so often” | Catherine Fletcher on what the Romans did for European transport networks

But, from the start, Roman roads also had a cultural role. They were a way of saying: “Hello, the Roman empire’s here.” All the way along every road, at mile intervals, were milestones that would tell you how far you had travelled – but also who the current emperor was. So, as well as making everyday life possible in various ways, roads also connected the Roman empire and made a cultural statement.

It’s very easy for us now to be fascinated by those roads, because they’re everywhere. On the other hand, they’re just not as glamorous as monumental sites such as Pompeii, for instance, so we don’t think about them in quite the same way.

You write that the staggering scale of the roads conveys Roman power on a level no individual building can match. Should we see the Roman road network as a kind of monument in itself?

Yes, I think so. When you stop and consider the fact that the routes went right the way across Europe, up into Scotland, around the Mediterranean, along the top of north Africa and through to Turkey, it’s really spectacular. But, perhaps because parts of the network are hidden now, we don’t realise how remarkable it is. It only became clear to me when I actually started travelling around Europe to see the roads while I was researching this book.

When did construction of the roads start?

The most famous of the roads, the Via Appia, emerged around the fourth century BC. It connected Rome with Brindisi, on the Adriatic coast of the Italian peninsula, and really set a precedent for long-distance roads connecting more and more places as the power of the Roman empire started to expand.

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The Via Flaminia went north from Rome to Rimini. Other routes crossed the peninsula from elsewhere on the Adriatic coast. And, as the Romans expanded outward beyond Italy, the Via Egnatia went through what’s now Albania and Greece, and the Via Augusta linked Cádiz to the Pyrenees.

By the third or fourth century AD, a network of Roman roads stretched all around the Mediterranean – so we’re talking about really impressive growth.

Was length the key feature that set these roads apart from any that had been laid before?

Yes. Vitally, these were long-distance trunk routes that allowed for really effective connections between imperial centres. And, as time went on, that’s what allowed them to be used for a range of services. There was the postal service, for instance, which enabled specific types of official to pass messages along to one another.

There was also the rise of what we might now think of motorway service stations: mansiones, which had Roman-style baths and places you could change horses; and mutationes, which were more basic changing posts where you could pick up fresh horses. So a real infrastructure developed to facilitate very fast travel along these roads.

As well as length and speed of construction, there’s another characteristic often mentioned when talking about Roman roads: straightness. Were they really so very straight – and if so, why?

This is something experts argue over! But the network certainly features very impressively long, straight stretches of road. Travelling along the Via Appia from Rome towards Terracina, for instance, involves driving for miles along a very, very straight stretch of road.

This straightness was appealing to the Romans for a few reasons. It made everything easy to map, and it brought other obvious benefits: you can go faster in wheeled transport on a straight road than if you’re constantly having to pause to navigate bends, for instance. But it also acted as an indicator of the Romans’ power, because building those bridges, making those cuttings and digging those tunnels demonstrated their mastery over nature.

It’s worth saying, of course, that it’s not entirely true that the roads always went dead straight. Sometimes you can sense the builders thinking, when faced with a stretch of difficult terrain: this isn’t going to be worth it. Some roads go around a hill or avoid a particularly steep valley, because of the extra engineering that would have been involved.

What were the roads made from?

They were built using whatever materials were available locally. Some were paved with local stone, as is the case with the Via Appia. Others weren’t paved at all but instead topped with a kind of gravel called glareae, which was a bit more like modern tarmac: you just threw small stones across the surface of the road, and waited for them to be beaten into it over time by the traffic.

Who funded the construction of these roads?

In some cases, it was prominent private individuals. The Via Appia was funded by Appius Claudius Caecus, one of Rome’s most prominent men. He effectively sponsored its construction – and, of course, it was named after him. Some roads were funded by consuls, governors and so on.

But in other cases the roads were established by an invading Roman army, either for military purposes or as a way to consolidate relationships with the territory being conquered. However they were funded, once they were built their maintenance became the responsibility of the people living along the route. So that, in a sense, acted as a kind of tax imposed by the Romans on local populations.

You mentioned that you explored some of the network while researching this book. Did that change how you viewed it?

One of the things that struck me is that I hadn’t fully considered just how far east this road network extends. I travelled from Vienna through to Bulgaria where, beneath a metro station in the capital, Sofia, you can still walk along part of a Roman road that was on a major route linking what’s now Istanbul with Vienna.

As someone who grew up during the Cold War, I always saw the Roman empire as somehow belonging to the western world. But, of course, a significant part of this network was behind the iron curtain. It was a much more eastern empire than I was taught as a child.

As you say in the book, these roads were so powerful because they spanned so much of the continent, and drew together so many of its people into an empire. How key was this network in shaping how the Roman empire was run?

To run an empire effectively, you have to know what’s going on at the far reaches. You need a method of communicating with its governors, and a method of control that allows you to mobilise troops quickly to reach any given area. The roads definitely provided a useful tool for Roman authorities in their hard, hawkish way of running an empire.

But they also enabled a softer style of imperial governance: bringing people in, making them part of the conversation and allowing them to access the privileges of the capital city. The Colosseum, for instance, included a set of seats for merchants from Cádiz who were doing business in Rome. The roads definitely facilitated a combination of those two ways of ruling the empire.

What would it have been like to travel along these roads, both when the empire was at its height and as it started to decline?

Travel would have been much slower than we’re used to today. The suggestion is that you might have been able to cover as much as 30 miles a day – though that would vary hugely, of course, depending on whether you were on foot or in some sort of carriage. If you were wealthy, you might even have sat in a kind of chair carried by enslaved people.

Whatever the method of transport, it was better to travel as part of a group rather than going alone, because the roads were often quite dangerous. There was a lot of concern about bandits, of being robbed, and of being ripped off by the innkeepers along the route.

But even as the might of the Roman empire started to ebb, the roads were obviously still there. It takes quite a lot to completely ruin a road, and much of the network remained perfectly passable for quite some time.

That wasn’t the case everywhere: there was a road that ran east to west across southern France that we think seems to have fallen out of use. And because some of the network started to become less convenient for very long journeys, people do seem to have switched to sea routes where available, particularly to bypass land routes that were too fragmented or too uncomfortable.

Your book goes on to explore the afterlives of the Roman road network into the subsequent centuries. By the time we reach the crusades, you characterise the roads as being places of both opportunity and danger. Why?

Many of the crusading armies opted to get to the Holy Land by sea. But travelling across water was expensive, particularly for a large army with lots of horses to move. Add in the risks posed by pirates and shipwrecks, and you can see why some – particularly those coming from central Europe – might take an overland route.

There were still risks, of course. We know that the armies irritated local populations, sometimes even raiding them for supplies en route, so there’s evidence of local people attacking crusaders. And, as I mentioned earlier, bandits remained an ever-present threat.

As well as acting as a conduit for political and military force, these roads had another key historical use: as pilgrimage routes. What aspects of that story are important?

Pilgrimage was a phenomenon that existed from very early on in the history of Christianity, and offers another side to the story of Roman roads. Take the apostle St Paul who, after various periods of house arrest, was forced to travel to Rome to go on trial. He landed at the trading port of Puteoli [Pozzuoli, in Campania], where he was greeted by local Christians, and made his way up the Via Appia.

The reason that’s interesting is because we see later travellers, and later tourists, who are drawn to the roads not because they buy into the narrative of the Roman empire’s greatness but because they identify with the figure of Paul as someone persecuted by the Romans.

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During the Renaissance era, the trend for making cultural journeys along these roads really came to the fore. Did that change how they were regarded?

Whereas the roads had primarily been noted for their practical value – for pilgrims, for instance, as a way of getting to Rome – the interest in ancient cultures that developed during the Renaissance period meant that Roman roads started to be seen as interesting cultural artefacts in their own right.

In the 15th century, Pope Pius II became agitated when he witnessed people digging up Roman roads to remove their stones. He asked a local ruler of lands south of Rome to stop it going on, and to make sure the roads were preserved and kept in situ. That was the start of a series of efforts by Renaissance popes and rulers to preserve and care for ancient artefacts and learn more about them. We can see a similar growth in interest among travellers then, too.

Alongside this growing recognition of the roads’ cultural value, the need for military and political power obviously continued into the 19th and 20th centuries. Did the roads also continue to be important then, both as routes and as symbols?

Absolutely. Napoleon was a great fan of Roman roads. And, of course, in the early 20th century Italy had a Fascist government, led by Mussolini, which had quite an ambiguous relationship with the ancient past. It wanted to be modern – a cult grew up around the motor car and the virtue of speed – but Mussolini himself drew inspiration from the ancient Romans to build a road network.

A key example of a Fascist road can still be seen near the Roman Forum itself. There’s a big road linking the Colosseum at one end with the huge white typewriter monument, the ‘Altar of the Fatherland’ [aka the Victor Emmanuel II National Monument], at the other. That route was cut right through the city to enable Mussolini’s motorcade to parade through the middle of an ancient setting.

He wasn’t alone in that fixation, either. Hitler famously launched a programme building autobahns. He is supposed to have said that, when he conquered Russia, he wanted to expand an imperial road network into that nation along the lines of the routes created by the ancient Romans.

So would you say that this history is valuable because it reveals the nature of political power across the centuries?

I think so, because Roman roads turn up so often throughout European history! When I started researching this book, I thought that I would be writing about the logistics of the journey to Rome, so I was astonished by the number of major historical events I ran into. We’ve talked about some of them, but there are many others.

Charlemagne had a grand vision for a road network in the eighth and ninth centuries. Much later, the British empire explicitly drew inspiration from the Romans in the way in which it constructed roads and railways in India. Underlying all of these examples is the fact that, when European powers have gone about growing and expanding outside their borders, the model they have very often looked to is the Roman empire.

That’s because we can still see physical evidence of its extent, partly in the form of its road network. As that’s the way European rulers have thought over the centuries, understanding the relationship between the Roman empire and its infrastructure is really important.

We’ve discussed some examples, but did you follow any other specific roads you’d recommend as routes into this history?

Where the Via Flaminia reaches a place called Furlo [in the Marche region of central Italy], there’s a road that heads through an incredibly steep valley between mountains. It’s cut into the rock and, at a certain point, the people building it were no longer able to terrace it into the side of the valley, and instead had to make a tunnel. It’s spectacular, and incredible to think of them digging halfway up a cliff, with only basic tools and no electricity.

In Britain, I’d advise people to drive along the A5 near Wroxeter in Shropshire, which gives a good sense of a straight Roman road. If you continue east along the A5, to the village of Wall, you can see beautifully preserved remnants of one of the mansiones service stations.

• Read more | Exploring Britain’s Roman roads with historian Dan Jones

Finally, which were better: Roman roads at their peak, or the roads we have today?

I think that’s a very unfair comparison [laughs]! You see that kind of meme pop up online every so often – someone comparing a pothole-riddled modern road with a perfectly paved Roman one. But the difference is, of course, nobody was trying to drive a juggernaut along their roads – they would break very quickly if you did.

And, as we’ve discussed, it’s not as if the Romans managed to maintain a perfect road network. Roads fall into disrepair, their upkeep requires a lot of effort, and Roman authorities faced similar maintenance and infrastructure issues as we do today.

Catherine Fletcher is professor of history at Manchester Metropolitan University, and author of numerous books, including The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance (Vintage, 2020)

Her book The Roads to Rome: A History is out now