Even though “All roads lead to Rome” can be attributed to Alain de Lille (1128-1202), not much of this broad survey of Roman roads falls within the chronological boundaries of medieval history. Catherine Fletcher takes us from the days of the Roman Republic through the grand tours of early modern times and down to the rebuilding efforts after WWII in Italy and to recent tourism on trains and planes. She also offers a good deal of autobiography, as she has personally covered much of this ancient ground in her own travels in recent years.
Conquest and empire: the tale of Rome is a tale of how roads in all directions made all this possible; soldiers and then imperial officials, merchants and all sorts of others on the vast network. Built at considerable cost and by crews of laborers, mostly unfree and who might number into the tens of thousands used for a 5 mile stretch of the Apian Way), the roads of early days were largely preserved over the centuries, centuries that covered the wanderings of the early disciples such as Peter and Paul, of Christian bishops and others seeking an endorsement of some sort in Rome, of pilgrims, and eventually of those on a crusade. The Roman roads shown in Fletcher’s map—such familiar ones as the Appian Way or the Flaminian Way among dozens of others such as the Via Catine or the Via Catilina (map, p. iv-v)—were still mostly usable and familiar despite years of heavy usage. It was in the interest of medieval people of so many stations in life—feudal lords along with civil and ecclesiastical authorities, as well as the thousands engaged in more pedestrian affairs—to keep the roads they “inherited” in reasonable repair and they largely did so. You had to know how to get there, wherever there was—Rome, or Loreto, or even Jerusalem, or perhaps it was to choose from among the innumerable short-distance sites that grew up to answer to spiritual and/or secular concerns. If Santiago de Compostella was to grow to profit from those who came to honor the (supposed) relics St. James, they had to be able to reach their destination in good condition. And an annual village fair, or the calling of a magistrate’s court or of a royal courier now in the marketplace, also figure as reasons to take to the road, and would that it was still in a passable condition But whether it was for “just down the road” or for Canterbury or St. Martin at Tours or perhaps for all those virgins at Cologne, there itineraries and guides to where to stay and known itineraries to follow.
One of the personal extras that Fletcher offers is to trace the route of many who wended their way on these roads, nor does she neglect the eastern or the Mediterranean portions of Rome’s empire and its geographical and cultural legacy, She does this for our medieval pilgrims, for some of the crusaders (either by land or by sea), and then for modern travelers on the grand tour, as well as for herself (in including stops in the Balkans). The hotel chains of medieval Europe can offer fair competition to their modern successors, as those on one of the long-surviving Roman roads could go from town to town and might well hope to find reasonable lodging, at a reasonable price, at the next stop along a road built by those following the orders of Augustus Caesar. It might be the road from Antioch to Tarsus or the road from Cordoba to Valencia, with over-nights and changes of horses along the way. From Lucca on the Via Francigena and Florence on the Via Cassia there were, in 1332, 82 alberghi with 423 beds. In the twelfth century Benjamin of Tudela might have had a Visa card as he made his confident way from Zaragoza to the eastern Mediterranean.
We leave the Middle Ages and, to a considerable extent, the nature of some of the noteworthy road traffic changes: The Reformation, political exiles, a famous traveler like Queen Christina of Sweden on her way to conversion and a luxurious self-imposed exile to Rome, and then the men and women of letters and of the grand tour: Goethe, Montaigne, Keats and Shelley, Mussolini’s machers, and countless others, both men and women. It always had to be a road, and invariably one surveyed and built by the Romans, at least until the railroad and then the airplane came along to compete with travel on the ground. More medieval would have been welcome in a TMR review, but we are well served in the readable and informative chapters so wisely devoted to those centuries between the early peregrinations of the apostles and seventeenth-century flight to Roma of Stuart pretenders and their associates. And to their credit, medieval commentators were fully appreciative of what they had inherited as we set the Middle Ages between ancient days and modern times. In the sixth century Procopius said of the Appian Way: “after the passage of so long a time and being traversed by many wagons and all kinds of animals every day, its paving stones have neither separated at all at the joints, nor has any one of the stones been worn out or reduced in thickness—nay, they have not even lost any of their polish.” Would that the US Interstate highway system could match this accolade.