How Roman roads transformed Europe

Summary

History Extra Podcast: How Roman Roads Transformed Europe – Detailed Summary

Release Date: January 9, 2025

In this compelling episode of the History Extra Podcast, hosted by Matt Elton and produced by Immediate Media, Catherine Fletcher, the author of Roads to Rome: A History, delves into the profound impact of Roman roads on Europe. Drawing upon her extensive research and personal explorations of ancient pathways, Fletcher uncovers how these infrastructural marvels not only facilitated daily life and military movements but also served as enduring symbols of Roman power and cultural integration.

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Introduction: The Dual Nature of Roman Roads

Catherine Fletcher begins by addressing the seemingly contradictory perception of Roman roads as both mundane and monumental:

“Roman roads right from the start have done two different things... they have this sort of full purpose. ...they record and they sort of make a cultural statement” (01:59).

Fletcher emphasizes that while these roads were essential for everyday activities—such as accessing markets or voting—they also stood as lasting testaments to the Roman Empire’s presence and authority, marked by milestones that chronicled emperors and significant events.

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Scale and Impact: A Continental Network

The Romans engineered an extensive network of roads that spanned across Europe, connecting key regions from the ancient world to the modern landscape. Fletcher highlights the sheer scale and enduring legacy of these roads:

“There's a whole connecting tissue there that when you kind of think and stop and look at the map, you think, that's really quite spectacular” (04:36).

She discusses how roads like the Via Appia, Via Flaminia, and Via Egnatia facilitated not only military logistics but also trade, communication, and cultural exchange, effectively knitting the vast empire together.

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Engineering Mastery: Construction and Design

Delving into the technical aspects, Fletcher explores the construction techniques and design principles that made Roman roads exceptional. She addresses the common belief about their straightness:

“There are some very impressive long, straight stretches of road... it's very easy to map” (07:35).

While many Roman roads are renowned for their straight trajectories, Fletcher acknowledges that practicality sometimes dictated deviations to navigate challenging terrains. She praises the engineering prowess required to build enduring roads without modern technology, citing spectacular tunnels like the one in Furlough on the Via Flaminia as prime examples.

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Funding and Labor: Who Built the Roads?

Fletcher sheds light on the various sources of funding and labor behind the construction of Roman roads:

“In some cases, these are prominent private individuals... Appius Claudius Caecus, who is a prominent person in Rome... the army is building a road as it goes into a territory” (09:32).

She explains that roads were often funded by influential individuals or constructed by the military during campaigns. The labor force likely included soldiers, possibly prisoners of war, though evidence regarding forced labor remains inconclusive.

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Life on the Roads: Travel and Travelers

Exploring the human aspect, Fletcher paints a vivid picture of what it was like to traverse Roman roads:

“You probably do about 30 miles a day of travel... roads were quite dangerous... threats of banditry” (12:35).

She describes the modes of transportation available—ranging from walking and horse-drawn carriages to luxurious litters for the wealthy—and the social dynamics, including the presence of retinues for protection. The roads were lifelines for movement but also zones fraught with risks akin to modern-day concerns like traffic congestion and service station scams.

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Decline and Durability: From Empire to Medieval Europe

Despite the fall of the Roman Empire, the roads remained functional for centuries, though maintenance waned over time:

“The roads are obviously still there... some roads effectively aren't passable by wheeled transport anymore” (14:14).

Fletcher discusses how certain routes fell into disuse or deteriorated, while others continued to serve local populations. The transition into the medieval period saw occasional efforts to preserve these roads, though often hampered by resource constraints and shifting priorities.

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Crusades: Roads of Opportunity and Peril

The medieval Crusades reinvigorated the use of Roman roads, transforming them into corridors for religious and military expeditions:

“Crusade documentation allowed me to... negotiate over taxes and tariffs... roads as a place of dreaming” (22:46).

Fletcher illustrates how Crusading armies utilized these ancient pathways, navigating dangers such as banditry and local conflicts. The roads facilitated not only the movement of troops but also the exchange of ideas and cultures, albeit amidst turmoil.

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Renaissance Revival: Cultural Journeys and Preservation Efforts

During the Renaissance, a renewed interest in classical antiquity spurred efforts to restore and preserve Roman roads as cultural heritage:

“Pope Pius II... asks the local ruler... to stop that happening and make sure the roads are preserved” (26:11).

Fletcher highlights how Renaissance figures viewed these roads as links to a glorious past, inspiring journeys that blended pilgrimage with scholarly exploration. This period marked the beginning of viewing Roman roads not just as functional infrastructure but as cultural icons worthy of preservation.

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Modern Influences: From Fascism to Contemporary Infrastructure

The legacy of Roman roads extended into the 20th century, influencing modern road construction and political symbolism:

“Mussolini is very much inspired to build roads... Hitler... building the autobahns” (29:04).

Fletcher discusses how authoritarian regimes like Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany drew inspiration from Roman engineering, integrating similar principles into their road projects to symbolize power and control.

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Lessons and Reflections: Understanding Political Power Through Infrastructure

Fletcher posits that Roman roads offer valuable insights into the exercise of political power and empire management:

“European rulers have thought over the centuries... relationship with the Roman Empire and its infrastructure... is often actually quite an important thing to do” (30:36).

She argues that studying these roads reveals how infrastructure can serve as a backbone for political strategy, military dominance, and cultural integration, lessons that remain relevant in understanding modern governance and infrastructure development.

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Visiting Roman Roads Today: Recommendations for Enthusiasts

For listeners inspired to explore these ancient pathways, Fletcher provides practical recommendations:

“If you were lucky enough to be in Italy... Via Francigena... Roxeter, Roman City... the village of Wall” (32:56).

She suggests visiting well-preserved sections of the Via Appia near Rome, undertaking long-distance walks on the Via Francigena pilgrimage route, and exploring Roman sites in Britain such as Roxeter and Wall, where remnants of service stations offer tangible glimpses into ancient travel life.

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Conclusion: The Enduring Legacy of Roman Roads

Fletcher concludes by urging listeners to appreciate the cultural and historical significance of Roman roads:

“Thinking about that relationship with the Roman Empire and its infrastructure is often actually quite an important thing to do” (34:13).

She emphasizes that these roads are not merely remnants of the past but active testimonies to the interconnectedness and enduring influence of Roman engineering on subsequent civilizations worldwide.

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Final Thoughts

This episode of the History Extra Podcast offers an in-depth exploration of Roman roads, revealing their multifaceted roles in shaping Europe’s historical and cultural landscape. Through Catherine Fletcher’s expertise, listeners gain a comprehensive understanding of how these ancient infrastructures continue to influence modern society, politics, and cultural identity.

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Additional Resources

• Book Mentioned: Roads to Rome: A History by Catherine Fletcher, published by Bodily Head.
• Next Episode Preview: History's Greatest Cities featuring Catherine Fletcher and Paul Bloomfield exploring Florence’s streets and sights.

For more detailed insights and to explore related content, visit HistoryExtra.com.

Transcript

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[History Extra Podcast]

Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. They spanned a continent, offered a conduit for soldiers and pilgrims alike, and may not have been as straight as legend suggests. Roman roads played a formative role in the development of Europe for centuries, and as Catherine Fletcher, the author of a new book, the Roads to Rome, argues, these highways also inspired the continent's leaders right up to the present day. Matt Elton spoke to Katherine to find out more.

[Matt Elton]

Catherine, thank you so much for being with us today on the History Extra podcast. I'd like to start where you start in your book, which is the fact that these roads are at the same time something we're fascinated by and something that has been sort of written off as mundane in some sense. Can you talk a little bit about that seeming contradiction?

[Catherine Fletcher]

Yeah. So I think that Roman roads right from the start have done two different things. On the one hand, they have this sort of full purpose. They're going to get people from A to B. Quite importantly, they might get the Roman army from A to B, and perhaps we can come back to that. But they just do something that makes everyday life quite a lot easier for a lot of people. If you live on a road, it'll help you get to market more effectively. It might help you go and vote. If you're the type of person who's allowed to vote in Roman society, it's just generally the sort of thing that once it's there, there, you might not notice it very much, even though it's quite important to getting on with your life. But also right from the start, Roman roads are quite monumental and they have this cultural role of saying, hello, the Roman Empire is here, because all the way along the road, every mile you have a milestone, it might tell you which mile of the road that you're at, but it will often also tell you who the current emperor is, or perhaps if one emperor has been deposed and he's gone through a damnatio memoria and he's not to be remembered anymore, he's never been crossed out, so you know that something's happen. And so they kind of. They record and they sort of make a cultural statement at the same time as just making life possible in different ways and connecting the different parts of the empire together. So I think, you know, it's easy for us now, on the one hand, to be quite fascinated by these roads because they're everywhere. They're very easy to find a Roman road locally if you live on the territory of that old empire. But on the other hand, they're perhaps not as glamorous as something like the Colosseum. So, yeah, perhaps not as glamorous as something like Pompeii. So perhaps we don't think about them being quite the same way.

[Matt Elton]

You write that the staggering scale of these roads conveys Roman power on a level no individual building, however grand, can match. Is there something there about the fact we should see these roads as a monument in themselves?

[Catherine Fletcher]

Yeah, I think so. I mean, when you look at the maps and you look at the way that the stones, or at least the roots, there's a little bit of a myth that all Roman roads were paved all the time. But, you know, you see the connection of those routes, right the way across Europe, right up into Scotland, down to Cardiff, all around the Mediterranean, along the sort of top of North Africa, through Holy Land, through Turkey, beyond. You know, there's a whole connecting tissue there that when you kind of think and stop and look at the map, you think, that's really quite spectacular. But perhaps because it's hidden, it's often underground, only certain bits of it have been brought up. I think it didn't become apparent to me until I actually started getting on trains and going and realising that you could see the remnants of these roads for thousands of miles.

[Matt Elton]

One of the fascinating things about your book is the fact you trace some of these roads for yourself. And we'll get into that in a minute. Before we do, we should talk about some of the physical logistics and characteristics of these roads. We're talking about when did these Roman roads start coming into existence. And did they draw on existing networks? In some ways, yes.

[Catherine Fletcher]

So we're around about the 4th century BCE, we get the Via Appia, which is the most famous of the roads. It's not the earliest of the roads leading out of Rome. That's probably the Via Casalina, which is the next one around Rome to the right. But the Via Appia is the really famous long distance road and that connects Rome with Brindisi, which is on the other side of the Italian peninsula, on the Adriatic side of the peninsula. And that really perhaps sets up the idea of these long distance trunk roads connecting more and more places as the power of Rome, as its empire, starts to expand. Eventually we go on from there. We get the Via Flaminia, which goes up north from Rome towards Rimini, also on the Adriatic coast. So get these routes across the peninsula. And then as the Romans go further out beyond Italy, we start to get the Via Egdertia, which goes sort of through Albania and Greece, connecting to what becomes Constantinople, now Istanbul in Turkey. And then in the other direction, as the Romans expand into Spain, we get the Via Augusta, which connects Carith up through places like Cordoba, Valencia and so on. So, you know, by the time you get to perhaps a little bit after Christ, there's a whole sort of connection of Roman roads all around the Mediterranean. So it really is, over hundreds of years, some quite impressive growth.

[Matt Elton]

You mentioned length there. Was that one of the key characteristics that set them apart from what had come before?

[Catherine Fletcher]

Yeah, I think it's the idea that you get these kind of long distance trunk routes that can connect the imperial centres very effectively. And you also, as we get further along in time, we get services that actually facilitate the passing of messages. So you get really a postal service, the cursus publicus, which certain categories of official are permitted to use to pass messages along from stop to stop. You get the rise of what would be now we might think of as motorway service stations, the mansiones, which have a little travel lodge style outfit, they have a Roman style bath, they have places where you can change horses. And in between those you get smaller, what are called mutatio, those more basic kind of just changing posts where you can pick up fresh horses. So there's a real infrastructure to facilitate very fast travel along the roads, as.

[Matt Elton]

Well as length and speed. We may as well get into it straight up. One of the things that people talk about when they talk about Roman roads is the fact they are straight. Is that true and why was that the case? If it is True.

[Catherine Fletcher]

Well, this is something that the experts on the detail of the roads really argue over. But certainly there are some very impressive long, straight stretches of road. You can look at the Via Appia itself as you go down from Rome towards Terracina further south on the coast. You just drive for miles along a very, very straight piece of road. In some ways, it's easy to map. It's also an indicator of power in that it shows that sort of mastery over nature. If you can make those cuttings, if you can build those bridges, if you can put in the tunnels, that in itself is quite impressive piece of engineering. But it isn't true that they absolutely always go dead straight. Sometimes they do say, this is not going to be worth it. We are going to go around the side of this hill, we're going to follow a valley around, because the level of extra engineering involved just really gets too much.

[Matt Elton]

As well as sort of demonstrating a mastery over the environment. Were there competitive advantages of being straight?

[Catherine Fletcher]

Well, I think there's certain things about an army being able to march in a straight line. They're quite effective for moving certain things. You could, obviously, you can kind of go faster with wheeled transport on a straight road than you can if you're just sort of constantly having to pull cause to curve around and so forth. So there possibly some efficiencies in terms of just mapping them, but we get into some really sort of detailed expert debates about exactly the whys and wherefores of the planning of the roads. And unfortunately, we don't have the evidence in terms of things like very detailed engineering manuals telling you how to do it. This was knowledge that was passed on probably orally, between people doing road plannings. Perhaps they wrote it down, but if they did, we don't have those documents to tell us. So it has to be, in the end, quite a speculative area of research.

[Matt Elton]

And do we know who paid for and who built these roads?

[Catherine Fletcher]

Well, in some cases these are prominent private individuals. So the Via Appia is Appius Claudius Caecus, who is a prominent person in Rome. He pays for the roads, kind of effectively sponsors it, and of course, it's named after him, some cases the consuls, their governors and so forth. In some cases, though, the roads are established by an invading army, so the army is effectively a public project, in a sense. The army is building a road as it goes into a territory, and we get these roads that are constructed for military purposes, either in the process of conquering, because you need a road to move the army along, or perhaps after You've made a temporary road or used existing roads to sort of consolidate relationships between places that have now been conquered. So there's a little bit of variety there, but it's, you know, essentially the point about it is the, I think, you know, there's a mixture of ways that roads are funded and once they're there, they become the responsibility of the people living alongside to maintain. So that also sort of puts a tax on the locals, in a sense.

[Matt Elton]

And do we know who built them and what they were built from?

[Catherine Fletcher]

Well, in terms of who built them, sometimes it is the army. There's some evidence for possible use of forced labour. You know, the evidence on that is quite shaky. It's difficult to pin down to what extent prisoners of war who were captured and enslaved were then made to work on road building projects. But there is in the work of Tacitus and Roman historian a suggestion that that is one of the things that captives are made to do. Beyond that, what are they made of? Well, they're made of what's available locally. So they will generally take the locally available stone, sometimes they'll pave roads. In that classic image of the Roman road with large paving stones that you might see on the Via Appia, that's a good example of where you've got sort of paving with local stone. Other places they might not pave roads, they might just have gravel topped roads. This kind of gravel, it's called Glaraya, a little bit more like modern tarmac. You just sort of throw small stones across the surface of the road and sort of beat them into the surface with traffic over time. And that then creates what they call a metalled road, one that's surfaced and not just beaten earth.

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[Matt Elton]

Of course, your book isn't just about the physical roads themselves. It's about the people who made use of them, who travelled along them. Can you give us a sense of what it was like to travel along a Roman road at the time that they were built or shortly afterwards?

[Catherine Fletcher]

Yeah, I mean, the suggestion is that you probably do about 30 miles a day of travel. So it's still an awful lot slower journey than we might be talking about at the moment. We know that because there's various legislation around how fast people who are called in for court hearings are expected to travel to meet their deadline for getting to make their case in court. So we can calculate what's expected to be possible. If you've got the kind of, you know, reasonable amount of money, so you'd be going sort of from stop to stop every few miles, you might be. I mean, you might be on foot, you might be in various types of carriage, open or closed. If you're a wealthy person, you might be in a litter eventually, sort of being like, you know, sitting in a chair, being carried probably in that case by enslaved people. You would often not be travelling alone, you would have a retinue of people with you. Because the roads were quite dangerous. There was a lot of concern about bandits. Were you going to be attacked on the roads? Were you going to be robbed? There are lots of sort of stories around that threat, around the threat of being ripped off, around the noisiness and frustration sometimes of the roads when you're sort of queuing to perhaps get horses change or you're being ripped off by the innkeepers and so on. So, you know, there are some parallels very much with today, you know, complaining about motorway service prices and on the other hand. But it is much, much slower travel still than we would be familiar with.

[Matt Elton]

One of the complaints people often make about roads today is potholes. Were they a phenomenon? Were they a problem?

[Catherine Fletcher]

Oh, well, I mean, we do get complaints. I mean, particularly later on, as the Roman Empire is sort of struggling to stay together, about the state of the roads and whether the roads are passable. And you start to hear reports about the fact that certain roads effectively aren't passable by wheeled transport anymore. They're not really being maintained up to the standard way. You can take a cart along them. Everything is needing to go on the back of donkeys now. So, yes, we definitely get complaints about the state of the roads. And then also, much later on, as you kind of jumbled into the medieval period, you get, you know, people starting to say, well, evidence that the local peasants have just been helping themselves to the stone from these roads to build houses. Because, you know, they say, well, you know, people don't really need these stones. They haven't been kept in good repair. Why don't we just do something more useful with them? And then, you know, you get into a Renaissance and people say, no, no, actually, this is ancient heritage and we should be preserving it. But that argument takes quite a long time to really come along.

[Matt Elton]

And we'll head into some of that later history in a little bit before we do. You mentioned peasants there. Could anybody use these roads? Were they freely available for anyone to travel along?

[Catherine Fletcher]

Certainly anyone could go onto the roads. What you couldn't necessarily do is to get access to all the services in the cursus publicus. I mean, that is a privilege to be able to use those official messengers, to be able to, you know, get onto the official transport, to be able to have access to certain types of horse and so on that were kept specifically for official who were traveling along these long distance routes on government business. So yeah, there are sort of layers of who's allowed to be on the roads. But if you were living nearby a route. Yeah, you could go out and ride a horse or take a cart, or just walk along this road. You weren't going to be prevented from doing so.

[Matt Elton]

And by what point did most of the major routes in and out of.

[Catherine Fletcher]

Rome get established in and out of Rome itself? You know, we're really quite early on. We have these spokes of about eight major roads going out of Rome and you can still see them today. So the long distance roads, probably you're looking into the first century ce, we have most of the roads sort of ringing the Mediterranean and the kind of the peak of the spread of the Roman Empire. And then after that, some of them, you know, there's not much major, major long road building in detail.

[Matt Elton]

And we talked briefly earlier about the fact that you yourself have done a lot of travelling around this network. Can you give us a sense of what that was like and I suppose any feats of engineering that you found particularly remarkable?

[Catherine Fletcher]

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that struck me that perhaps I hadn't really thought about before is just, you know, how far east this road network goes. So a couple of the journeys that I did were going down from Vienna through Bulgari. So in Bulgaria you have Sofia, now the capital of Bulgaria, that has pieces of Roman road that was on a major Roman road connecting what are now Vienna and Istanbul. And underneath their kind of city centre metro station, you could go and walk along a bit of Roman road. The same further along on that route in Plovdiv, which is the old town of Philippopolis, underneath their main street, there are bits of Roman road dug out. You actually go into one of the stores, I think it's H and M. And in the basement they've got bits of Roman road. So it's kind of quite incredible to see that. And also just coming back and following through Greece, through Thessaloniki, through Albania and across the Adriatic, the fact that there's still a motorway which is named after the old Via Egnatia on that particular route. So I think part of that spanned the fact that, you know, when I grew up, these places were still behind the Iron Curtain. So there was a kind of. In this sort of Cold War childhood, I didn't really think of Eastern Europe very much as belonging to the Roman Empire, because the Romans were like a Western Eastern thing. But of course it did. It's a much more Eastern Empire a lot of the time that I think I certainly learned it as a child. And then I think just as well on the feats of engineering. I mean, it's a spectacular tunnel in a place called Furlough, which is on the Via Flaminia, which is actually in use as a main road up until the 1980s, and you can still drive through it today. And this is a road, you have to imagine a really, really steep valley between mountains. And the road is sort of cut into the rock on one side of the valley. And at a certain point, they stop being able to just terrace it into the side of this mountain, and they actually make a tunnel sort of almost along the side of the mountain that you could drive through. But it's incredible to think that that's just been dug through halfway up a cliff with the basic tools, no electricity. And so that in itself is really spectacular. And then there are also several tunnels, Naples, outside of Naples, that are well worth seeing. But again, yeah, just remarkable to think that these things were done without electricity, without that sort of expertise in modern engineering, calculating techniques, calculations of load bearing and so forth.

[Matt Elton]

As you say, they span so much of a continent, as you put it in the book, they drew together the city states of empire. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of these as drawing together this empire and I suppose the way it shaped Europe into the coming centuries?

[Catherine Fletcher]

Yeah, I think that if you're going to run an empire effectively, you need to know what's going on at the ends of it. You need to have a method of communicating with the governors in each place. You also need to have a method of control that says, you know, look, if there's a rebellion in local area, then we can get troops there quite quickly. And I think that one of what the Roman road network does is it enables the center of that empire because it's kind of the hard, the hawkish way of running an empire, if you like to threaten and to be informed about what's going on and to be informed about any potential problems at the edges of Empire as quickly and as effectively as possible. And on the other hand, it also enables that kind of softer style of imperial governance, which is, well, you bring people in from all parts of the empire and you talk to them and you allow them privileges in the capital city. So, for example, in Rome, there's a set of seats in the Colosseum which are given to the people from Cadiz, the merchants from Cadiz who are doing business in Rome. And so that's a friendly towards people from a far end of the empire. And I think there's that combination of the two things really depends on, on effective travel connections and those sort of networks being able to exist.

[Matt Elton]

We've talked a bit about what the roads were like when Rome's might was at its highest. What were people's experiences of the road network like as Rome started to fall and in the period immediately afterwards.

[Catherine Fletcher]

So the roads are obviously still there. It takes quite a lot to completely ruin a road. And in fact, these roads stay quite passable for quite some time. There are some that we think fell out of use. So for example, there's a road which would have gone sort of east to west across southern France, connecting to kind of that sort of Aquitaine area, where you could then get a sea connection up the sort of Atlantic coast of France that seems to have fallen out of use. But on the other hand, some of the roads that, you know, the Via Militaris, down from sort of Vienna area to Istanbul, that seems to have been passable to some extent across the top of Greece, perhaps a little bit less. So people do seem to switch to sea voyages at a certain point. And I think probably some of these roads became less convenient for very long distance journeys. And people would switch to the sea routes as an alternative if a sea route was available, because the road was simply sort of too uncomfortable. But in some cases, obviously there was no sea route available. And so there was much more of a case to keep that road connected.

[Matt Elton]

And by the time we reached the Crusades, I think I'm right in saying that you sort of explore that period as a time of both opportunity and of danger. Can you just talk through us a little bit about those two forces during that era?

[Catherine Fletcher]

Yeah, I mean, obviously one of the things that Crusade documentation allowed me to do is to look at what was going on with some of these routes in that medieval period and to say, okay, where are these people going? To what extent are they using the roads? Can we tell whether these roads are passable? Certainly, for some of the crusading armies very definitely opted to get to the Holy Land, which was their objective, by sea. But sea was expensive, particularly if you're a large army, if you have lots of horses to move. There are risks of shipwrecks, there are risks of pirates. And so particularly armies coming from the sort of German lands might come down and take an overland route. We know that some of them did. And in the course of taking those routes, there's a lot of negotiation with local rulers. There's a lot of attacks on the roads in both directions. The Crusaders attacking local people, but also raiding for klies effectively, and also vice versa. Local people who are irritated with the behaviour of this army attacking in turn. So there's a lot of risk on the roads. There's a lot of reports of, in general at this time, of the dangers of banditry, of the dangers of being robbed or kidnapped, held for ransom on the road. And every so often you will see rulers who try to systematise things a bit, to improve conditions, to put local authorities in place, to manage things a little bit more effectively, and who negotiate over taxes and tariffs and so on. But yeah, I mean, the Crusades are a particular example of a revived semi military use for the roads. And, you know, that gives us some evidence about their condition, their state and the practices of travel at this time.

[Matt Elton]

One thing we've not talked about, we've talked about the roads as conduits of political power, of military force. We've not yet talked about them as routes of pilgrimage, which I think is an important aspect. What do we need to think about in terms of that use of these Rhodes?

[Catherine Fletcher]

So from very early on in Christianity, we start to get a slightly alternative story of the Rhodes to the one that I've been telling to some extent about Roman imperial power. And this is a story about the Rhodes as sites for Christian journeys. Perhaps most importantly, on the Via Appia we have the journey of the Apostle Paul, St. Paul, who after various periods of house arrest, is essentially made to come to Rome for trial, where he will eventually be executed. And he comes to Rome, he lands at Potzouli, which is just outside Naples. It is greeted by local Christians and he makes his way up the Via Appia. And that is an interesting story, I think, about that, because we then see later travelers who perhaps don't want to buy into the narrative of the greatness of the Roman Empire quite so much, identifying themselves instead with the life of Paul, with Paul as somebody who was persecuted by the Romans. So even from very early on, not every story that's about travel within the space of the Roman Empire is about, oh, yes, the Romans are great.

[Matt Elton]

And when we get to the Renaissance period, the idea of these as being cultural journeys really comes to the fore. What happens during that period and what attempts were made to restore, I suppose, this network?

[Catherine Fletcher]

Yes. So once we get to the Renaissance, there's a lot more interest in classical culture, in the ancient heritage, for its artistic value, for its own sake. I think rather than being a practical route for pilgrims, the Roman roads are a way of getting to Rome and then doing something. I think for some of the Renaissance figures, they're interesting in and of themselves. So Pope Pius II, in the middle of the 15th century, is very exercised by the fact that he's seen people digging up the roads and taking stone from them, and asks the local ruler in Nemi, south of Rome, to actually stop that happening and make sure the roads are preserved and put in situ. He starts quite a lot of efforts to preserve monuments which are continued by Renaissance popes, also other Renaissance rulers. Preserving doesn't always mean leaving them exactly where they are or not interfering with them. There's a lot of restoration effort. There's a lot of argument over what's authentic, and there's certainly a lot of movement of ancient statues around the place. But they do start caring about this culture. And you get a growing interest on the part of travellers in looking for ancient monuments, trying to identify them, trying to match them up with what the ancient source material describes as being in certain places.

[Matt Elton]

There's a really evocative line in your book where you say that the roads are a place to imagine and perhaps to dream. Is this a period in which we see people starting to think about these roads as representing some distant culture or some part of history that's no longer with them?

[Catherine Fletcher]

Yeah, I think they're very, very fascinated by the fact that all along these roads you can find these milestones. You can try and relate your journey to the work of an ancient poet. So, for example, so when we get onto the period of the Grand Tour, you have Joseph Addison, one of the writers on the Grand Tour, advising people to sort of refer to the literature of Horace. I mean, Horace has this great description of what it's like traveling down the Via Appia, where. Quite a complaining description. So there's this nice sort of, you know, comparison that you can make between your own life and that of these great ancient authors. So I think, yeah, very much is there's a sort of space for dreaming and space for imagining yourself into that position of the ancient Romans, almost As if by sort of walking in their footsteps. And writer after writer uses this metaphor of sort of treading in the dust of the ancients and so forth, you can sort of almost imbibe something of ancient Roman culture in a way that you can't simply by reading a book.

[Matt Elton]

Despite that, the sort of the drumbeat of the need for political and military power lasts right into the 20th century. Do these roads, does this network offer a model for political and military leaders of the 20th century?

[Catherine Fletcher]

Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I mean, before that, Napoleon has been a great fan of Roman roads. But once we get to the 20th century, obviously within Italy itself, from 1922, there's the fascist government. Mussolini is very much inspired to build roads. Fascism has quite an ambiguous relationship with the ancient past. It wants to be very modern and to have this sort of modern cult of speed in the motor car. And actually, a good example of a Fascist road I say good. That could actually be seen today is if you go to the Roman Forum itself, you'll see there's a big road that kind of connects through with the Coliseum at one end of it and then the kind of altar of the fatherland, that huge big white typewriter monument at the other. And that's actually a road that was cut through under fascism to be a parade route. So Mussolini and his motorcade could parade through the middle of this ancient setting. They also build roads out to Ostia and so on. And again, I mean, once Hitler comes to power in Germany, obviously, famously has the program of building the autobahns, but also is supposed to have said that, you know, when he conquers Russia, as he had hoped, they would then sort of expand an imperial road network into Russia, very much on the lines of the Roman road network. So, yeah, absolutely. Right up to the present day, people are taking inspiration from this history.

[Matt Elton]

And do you think one of the things we can gain from learning about this history is an understanding of political power across the centuries and even in today.

[Catherine Fletcher]

Yeah, I think the Roman roads turn up so often through European history. It's just astonishing to me. As I started writing, I thought I was going to be, you know, writing a book about people traveling to Rome. And I was just so surprised by the number of really major historical events that I ran into in the process. So, you know, not just Napoleon wanted to build a road, but before him, Charlemagne, the Emperor Charlemagne in the 8th, 9th century, wanting to build roads. After them, the government, the 20th century, the British Empire, taking inspiration from the Roman Empire in terms of, you know, building roads, and then Railways in India, that's very expanding, explicitly cited. So there's a whole sort of set in which when you think about what Europe does, when different European nations go about building their own empires and expanding outside their own borders, very often the model they look to is the model of the Romans because it's the one that's physically here on the continent. And so I think that's in understanding how European rulers have thought over the centuries. Thinking about that relationship with the Roman Empire and its infrastructure is often actually quite an important thing to do.

[Matt Elton]

And if we had to compare them, which were better, Roman roads at their peak or the roads we have today.

[Catherine Fletcher]

It'S a very unfair comparison, I think, because you can't. I mean, every so often some people put that meme on Facebook where they say like potholes today versus perfectly paved road. But the thing is, you weren't trying to send juggernauts along a perfectly paved road road, and it would very quickly break if you did. So I think, you know, the best of European transport today, and I took quite a lot of it as I was traveling around, is absolutely great, but, you know, have some significant problems of maintenance and standards of infrastructure. And indeed, you know, the Romans did not manage to keep up a perfect Roman road network forever by any means at all. And it does fall into disrepair. And I think, yeah, it's a lot of effort, it's a lot of cost and it's an awful lot of people doing labour to make sure that those roads are maintained from day to day.

[Matt Elton]

And if you were to encourage our listeners to go out and travel along a Roman road, to go and see a Roman road today, are there any that you'd recommend us as places to start?

[Catherine Fletcher]

Oh, well, if you were lucky enough to be in Italy, obviously there's a walking section of the Via Appia, which is a little way out of Rome, which is relatively easily up accessible out of Rome. If you want a really long distance walk, then the Via Francigena, which is a medieval pilgrim route, incorporated quite a lot of bits of Roman roads. You could take all the way from Canterbury down to Rome and walk it over three months. And that's very structured. You could also just pick one section to do. I actually found in British taking a little drive along the A5 out to Roxeter. Roxeter, Roman City, is a fantastic site. And actually I think one that not as many people know as they might, that gives you a really good sense of that kind of classic straight Roman road building in Britain. Roxeter and Also, a little bit further on, the town of Wall, which has a village of Wall, really, which has a beautifully preserved remnants of a Roman mansione or service station. So if you want to see where Romans stopped overnight at their travel lodge, then head for the village of Wall.

[Matt Elton]

And finally, how would you like listeners to this podcast, readers of your book, to stand back and think about these roads and I suppose even to compare them to the great efforts of other cultures, other civilisations.

[Catherine Fletcher]

I think what I'd like people to take away from the book really is just thinking about the cultural importance of this heritage and how it shaped so many people and how it's affected, you know, so much of European culture and indeed cultures beyond over the centuries. I think, you know, we often think, to borrow that quote from Monty Python, well, obviously the roads go without saying, and I think actually we could do with pausing and thinking about. Yeah, often the roads do go without saying, but they probably shouldn't because they've been very important, they've been very influential as a model over the years. But also the Roman roads have survived partly because there are big chunks of them built of stone and they have this very monumental quality of milestones. There are also huge road networks in China. There are. This is the kind of royal road across Persia. There are other big road networks around the world. And I think, you know, one of the ideas about a hierarchy of world civilizations, to some extent, you know, rest on the fact that these stone roads survived better and are therefore more visible today than perhaps road networks in other places.

[History Extra Podcast]

That was Catherine Fletcher. The Roads to Rome A History is out now, published by the Bodily Head. You can hear more from Catherine on our podcast, History's Greatest Cities, as she joins Paul Bloomfield to wander through the streets and sights of Florence. You can find a link to that in the episode description of this podcast. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.