Appian Way

This road is twenty-three hundred years old, and you can still walk on the original stones. The Via Appia was begun in 312 BC by the censor Appius Claudius Caecus, and the Romans called it the Regina Viarum — the Queen of Roads. It ran from Rome to Brindisi, about five hundred and sixty-nine kilometres, connecting the capital to the southeastern coast and the shipping routes to Greece and Egypt. Sections of the original basalt paving are so precisely fitted that grass still cannot grow between them.

The road was built to a standard that would make modern highway engineers envious. It was at least four metres wide — enough for two carts to pass — with gravel shoulders, drainage ditches on both sides, and milestones every Roman mile (about one thousand four hundred and eighty metres). The road surface was cambered to shed water. The foundations went down to a metre deep in some sections: rubble, then gravel, then cement, then fitted stone. This is essentially the same road-building method used today.

In 71 BC, after the defeat of Spartacus's slave revolt, six thousand captured slaves were crucified along the Appian Way from Capua to Rome. The bodies were left to rot as a warning and were reportedly never taken down. That is over two hundred kilometres of crucifixions. It remains one of the most brutal acts of mass punishment in recorded history, and walking along the road today, past the crumbling tombs and cypress trees, it is impossible not to think about it.

The section nearest Rome is now a regional park — the Parco dell'Appia Antica — and on Sundays, parts of it are closed to cars. This is one of the most peaceful walks in the city: ancient tombs lining both sides, umbrella pines overhead, wildflowers pushing through cracks in Roman engineering. The Tomb of Cecilia Metella, about three kilometres out, is a massive cylindrical monument from the first century BC that was converted into a castle in the Middle Ages.