A new book by British historian Catherine Fletcher argues that Roman roads were never simple archaeological remains but symbols that each era has reinterpreted, and that no single monument expressed the magnitude of Roman power more clearly than the network stretching across the empire.
Fletcher, a professor of history at Manchester Metropolitan University who specializes in the Renaissance and early modern Europe, opens her book by recalling that the saying “all roads lead to Rome” is a medieval proverb. She cites Alain de Lille and Chaucer before connecting the phrase to the Golden Milestone erected by Augustus. The book was published in a Spanish translation by Juan Rabasseda and Teófilo de Lozoya under the title “Los caminos a Roma.”
Her central method is to read a road as though it were a palimpsest, a manuscript erased and rewritten by empires, religions, artists and travelers. The Via Appia appears as a place where beauty and danger walk together, a world of layers that travelers have crossed on foot, on horseback and by vehicle for more than two millennia.
The book traces the range of people who traveled Roman roads: soldiers, imperial couriers, merchants, pilgrims, aristocrats on the Grand Tour and modern tourists. Fletcher argues that roads served conquest, commerce, administration and imagination alike, and that a straight road between Rome and Capua was not only a feat of engineering but a demonstration of authority.
The network reached approximately 100,000 kilometers, Fletcher notes. Roads became permanent monuments of imperial power early on, and even after the fall of Rome they continued to carry merchants, pilgrims and travelers. Reviewer Toni Montesinos observes that today’s highways, cycling routes and tourist itineraries occupy the same ground once covered by soldiers and traders.
Fletcher draws on classical authors including Plutarch and Statius alongside modern writers such as Robert Graves and Charles Dickens. She also cites Ottorino Respighi’s orchestral work “Pines of Rome” and Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” to show that Roman roads have continued to shape culture long after the empire ended. The breadth of the book, covering locations from Scotland to Cadiz to Istanbul and figures ranging from spies and bandits to Napoleon and Mussolini, is noted as a particular strength. Montesinos awarded the book eight out of ten.
Rome on the page
The review also considers “Roma desordenada. La ciudad y lo demás” by Juan Claudio de Ramón, published by Siruela with a prologue titled “La felicidad de Italia” by Ignacio Peyró. That prologue cited Doctor Johnson to the effect that a man who had not seen Italy was always conscious of an inferiority, and described the book as one of walks rather than of travel, written by someone who had lived in Rome rather than visited it.
De Ramón leads readers through Etruscan tombs, the Via Veneto and figures from Nero and Pasolini to Caravaggio, Bernini and Winckelmann, with particular attention to Spanish intellectuals in Rome, among them Rafael Alberti, who published “Roma, peligro para caminantes” in 1968. De Ramón describes Rome as a city whose image colonizes the mind long before anyone crosses its threshold, encountered thousands of times in photographs, films, T-shirts and keyrings. Writer Josep Pla, he notes, once said he avoided writing about Rome because otherwise he would go on for too long.
