The Roads of Rome

When I plan a trip for you, one of the first things I send you is a personalized Insider’s Reading and Movie List, complete with age-appropriate picks for children. You’ll also receive the best maps available (usually Touring Club Italia) for each of your bases, plus a curated list of resources to spark your inspiration as you dream about and prepare for your journey.

These include links to sites including history, archaeology, art, wine, and food — the perfect companions as you begin to imagine your adventure.

This week, I shared with my Insider’s Italy travelers a fascinating new discovery, Itiner-e, the Digital Atlas of Ancient Rome, a  sort of Google Maps for Roman roads : https://itiner-e.org/

This digital project maps the entire Roman Empire as it was in circa 150 AD, revealing that its network of roads was nearly 160,000 miles long, about twice what historians once believed.

Researchers, led by Pau de Soto of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, began by extracting data from historic copies of Roman maps and from the more than 8000 known miliaria, or Roman milestones.

Then they examined more recent historic maps, aerial photographs, and modern satellite imagery for glimpses of the ancient roads.

Such a wonderfully inventive convergence of scholarly insight and digital capability !

Open the site and zoom in on Italy and you’ll find thousands of documented road segments, each with remarkable detail: whether it was a major or secondary road, how confident researchers are about its exact route, when it was built… and you can even overlay modern roads onto the ancient map.

It’s a reminder that as you walk, drive, or – where safe – cycle across Italy, you’re often moving over the same limestone, granite, or basalt once trodden by Roman legions, merchants, peasants, animals, carts, and senators.

Beneath your feet – or wheels – lie the stones of an ancient world.  You can find traces of these timeworn Roman routes almost anywhere: a solitary stretch of stone glinting in the sun, a fragment winding through olive groves, or an entire roadway still perfectly laid after two millennia.

I will guide you to these remarkable places and introduce you to my archaeologist guides who bring the stories of Rome’s roads so vividly to life.

In Italy it is a delight to connect with these deeper layers of place, uncovering the history beneath our feet and the continuity between Italy’s ancient and modern worlds.

Every itinerary I create is designed to enrich your experience of Italy and understand it as an extraordinary living tapestry of time.