ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME

Road engineering, power and knowledge along the consular roads

In 312 BC, the censor Appius Claudius Caecus ordered the construction of a paved road between Rome and Capua: 212 kilometres in an almost straight line, with a standardised width, a layered construction technique and a gradient calculated for drainage. It was not the first Roman road — but it was the first major road infrastructure conceived as a system. This itinerary sets out from that construction site, tracing in six stops two thousand years of road engineering as an act that is at once technical and political. From the Miliario Aureo to the Parco della Caffarella, from the Museo delle Mura to the Via Appia Antica, each stop poses the same question: how do you build a straight road across undulating terrain, without formal structural calculation — and why does the alignment of that road survive in the landscape even today, long after the road itself has disappeared?