The Roads to Rome Cover

The Roads to Rome by Catherine Fletcher: A Review

Catherine Fletcher: The Roads to Rome, A History, The Bodley Head, London, 2024, reviewed by Charles Freeman

The Roads to Rome Cover

Simone Quilici, one of my former pupils (when I taught the International Baccalaureate History programme), is now director of the Via Appia, which stretches in its original paved state outside Rome. I was pleased to be able to take one of my tours there to see what Simone was up to. He is busy excavating the opulent villas which once lined the road.

Construction of the Via Appia began in 312 BC under the censor Appius Claudius Caecus. Its aim was to support military operations as Rome encroached on the Greek cities in southern Italy. The Via Appia, โ€˜the queen of the long roadsโ€™, according to the Roman writer Statius, lived on in the consciousness of later generations and virtually every traveller or pilgrim to Rome ventured along it to inspect its paving or the catacombs which lay beside it. The Via is, as of July 2024, the first road to be made a World Heritage Site by UNESCO so I was especially glad to see the publication of Catherine Fletcherโ€™s The Roads to Rome, an erudite and absorbing history which surveys not only the building of the original roads but their afterlives and diversions. Fletcher writes engagingly on her varied and often disjointed travels in search of surviving fragments.

Her approach, after three introductory chapters on the building of the imperial road network, is to take later travellers along the roads. So she recounts the escape from an arranged marriage in Constantinople of the mid-6th century Byzantine noblewoman, Arthelais, probably along the Via Egnatia. This road was the first to be built outside Italy, possibly in the 140s or 130s BC. Its starting point was the Million, originally a triumphal double gateway in Constantinople and now just a surviving stone, which marked distances from the eastern capital. The gateway may have been surmounted by the four Greek horses, now in St Markโ€™s, Venice. It would have been an uncomfortable journey to the port of Durres (now in Albania) and then across the Adriatic to Italy, as the road had decayed by the 6th century. Arthelaisโ€™ safe arrival, to see an uncle who would protect her, was short-lived as she died soon after reaching Italy.

By the 10th century, pilgrims were exploiting the original roads from northern Europe to reach Rome. The most famous, still patronised by pilgrims today, is the Via Francigena, which by-passed the coastal Via Aurelia but incorporated  parts of the Via Cassia. The stations on the road were first recorded in the 990s by Sigeric, an archbishop of Canterbury, on his way to receive his pallium from the pope in Rome. By the end of the 11th century, crusaders were choosing their own routes either by sea or land to the Holy Land whose roads had, of course, been once part of the Roman network. Many used the Via Egnatia or the Via Militaris (built in the 1st century AD), which went eastwards across what is now Bulgaria. Despite Covid restrictions and other hindrances, Fletcher makes an intrepid attempt to follow them. She avoids โ€˜the Bulgarian Forestโ€™, which offered a host of dangers for those crusaders going by land.

With the Renaissance, there was a revived interest in Classical sources and this included appreciation of the road network. Enea  Silvio Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II (r. 1458โ€“1564), was an exemplar of the entanglement of Christianity and paganism which gave such a boost to cultural life. This was an age of villa building along the ancient roads (as in Roman times), which required some rediscovery of the original surfaces or a repaving so that access was possible. Journey times approached those of 1,500 years before. One of the best travel journals, Fletcher tells us, is that of the French essayist Montaigne, who crossed the Alps to explore the roads to Rome, crossing southwards via Trent, Verona and Florence, admiring what ancient ruins he came across and being impressed by the improvements he found as he wandered from city to city.

Those embarking on the Grand Tour from Great Britain had had a Classical education beaten into them, so they knew the sources intimately. Their records are full of complaints about uncomfortable journeys in unsprung carriages, the hazards of the beds in inns, and the failure of the contemporary Italians to match the proud deeds of their Roman ancestors. Typically the tourists lamented the decay or complete disappearance of the original road network. โ€˜All are vanished, the splendid tumult is passed away: silence and desolation remain . . .โ€™ as William Beckford recorded on the road from Ostia to Rome. Luckily, from 1763, the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum helped restore confidence in the Roman experience.

The Romantics, among them Wordsworth, Goethe, Keats and Shelley, brought a new aesthetic dimension to travel. By this date it was not so much the surface of the ancient roads which excited travellers as the impact of Nature, especially in the Simplon Pass forged by Napoleon in an echo of his admiration of the feats of Hannibal in crossing the Alps. The story continues with the railways and the unification of Italy, which went hand in hand. (Not everyone approved. The fastidious John Ruskin compared being sent by railway as being โ€˜little different from becoming a parcel.โ€™) Garibaldiโ€™s exploits aroused new enthusiasm for the Classical heroes to which he was compared. Americans came too, among them Mark Twain, Nigel Hawthorne and Frank Douglass. Guidebooks, the celebrated Baedekers, ancestors of the Blue Guides, had to be provided to cater for them.

The 20th century is well dealt with by Fletcher. โ€˜The March on Romeโ€™ of 1922 provides an echo of the legions setting out on some of the same roads to conquer Italy. Mussolini was excited by the idea of recreating of the Roman Empire. He was responsible for the Via del Mare, which stretched from Rome to the ancient trading port of Ostia and the impressive Via dei Fori Imperiali which still cuts through the ancient fora. The fate of the Jews shows the roads being used in the other direction, leaving Rome for Auschwitz. With the Allied invasion of Italy, the Via Appia was designated as โ€˜Highway 7โ€™ and Fletcher devotes an entire chapter to the tortuous and brutal campaigns that followed in 1943โ€“4. Conquest is inseparable from the history of the network.

Almost any reference to the original roads catches Fletcherโ€™s eye and so this is a richly researched book which knows when to divert to travellersโ€™ tales. I much enjoyed it, not least the determination of the author to discover any trace of the original network.Throughout The Roads to Rome Fletcher reflects on the importance of road networks as defining the geographical unity of a country or empire. Yet the Via Appia remains supreme and its recent accolade as a World Heritage Site richly deserved.

by Charles Freeman. In his The Horses of St Markโ€™s (Little, Brown, UK, 2009; Abrams Press, US, 2010) he searches for accounts of triumphal chariots drawn by โ€˜four horsesโ€™ in Constantinople before the Venetians looted one of several recorded in the Fourth Crusade of 1204. He is also the author of Blue Guides’ Sites of Antiquity:


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