Via Appia (312 BC): The Appian Way, Queen of Roman Roads

The Via Appia, or Appian Way, was the first great Roman road, begun in 312 BC by the censor Appius Claudius Caecus to link Rome with Capua in Campania. Extended over the following century to Brundisium (modern Brindisi) on the Adriatic, it became Rome’s main highway to southern Italy, Greece and the East. Romans called it the regina viarum, the “queen of roads”, and long stretches of it, lined with tombs and ruins, can still be walked today.

Why Rome built the road

The road was born of war. In the late 4th century BC Rome was locked in the Second of the Samnite Wars against the mountain peoples of Samnium. After the disaster at the Caudine Forks in 321 BC and a further defeat at Lautulae in 315 BC, Rome needed a secure route to move troops quickly to its allies and colonies in Campania.

Earlier routes to the south, such as the inland Via Latina, ran through hilly country exposed to raids. The new road took a more direct line close to the coast, through Latium and the territory of recently subdued peoples, to Capua, the chief city of Campania and a Roman ally.

Appius Claudius Caecus

Appius Claudius, a patrician, held the censorship from 312 BC with Gaius Plautius. Censors kept the citizen lists and let public contracts, and Appius used the office boldly. According to Livy, he spent heavily on the road and on Rome’s first aqueduct, the Aqua Appia, also named after him, and he controversially admitted sons of freed slaves to the Senate.

Livy also says Appius held on to the censorship beyond the normal eighteen months in order to finish his projects. He later became consul twice, and in old age, when he had gone blind (hence the name Caecus, “the blind”), he is said to have persuaded the Senate to reject peace with King Pyrrhus of Epirus in 280 or 279 BC. He is one of the first Romans whose career is known in some detail.

Route and extension

The road left Rome by the Porta Capena, near the Circus Maximus, and ran south-east through the Alban Hills to Tarracina (Terracina) on the coast. Its most remarkable section crossed the Pontine Marshes in a long, almost perfectly straight line. Along part of this stretch a canal ran beside the road; the poet Horace describes travelling by night barge along it in about 37 BC.

From Tarracina the road went on via Fundi, Formiae and Minturnae to Capua, roughly 195 km (132 Roman miles) from Rome. Over the following century it was extended as Rome’s power grew:

• to Beneventum (Benevento), a Roman colony from 268 BC;
• to Venusia (Venosa) and Tarentum (Taranto);
• and finally to Brundisium (Brindisi), probably by the early 2nd century BC.

The full road from Rome to Brundisium measured roughly 540-570 km. From Brundisium ships crossed the Adriatic to Dyrrachium and Apollonia in modern Albania, where the Via Egnatia continued east towards Thessalonica and Byzantium. In AD 109 the emperor Trajan opened the Via Traiana, a quicker alternative between Beneventum and Brundisium, marked by his triumphal arch at Benevento.

How it was built

Roman roads were engineered to carry heavy traffic in all weathers. Builders surveyed straight alignments where possible, dug a trench down to firm ground, and filled it with layers of stones and gravel of decreasing size, sometimes bound with lime mortar. The top surface on major roads near Rome was paved with large, tightly fitted polygonal blocks of hard basalt (silex), giving the road a slight camber so that rain ran off into ditches.

The Via Appia was about 4 metres wide, room for two carts to pass, with raised kerbs and unpaved side paths for pedestrians and animals. Milestones recorded distances from Rome. The road was not paved all at once: Livy records that in 296 BC a path of squared stone was laid from the Porta Capena to the Temple of Mars, and that in 293 BC the road from the temple to Bovillae was paved with hard stone; paving spread along the route over the following decades.

The engineers also cut through hills, raised embankments across low ground and built bridges and viaducts. At Terracina, in the reign of Trajan, workers cut away the rocky headland of Pisco Montano to make room for the road along the shore, leaving numbered marks on the cliff to show the depth of the cutting.

Tombs and events along the road

A street of tombs

Roman law forbade burial inside the city, so families built tombs along the roads leading out of Rome. The Via Appia, as the grandest of these roads, became lined for miles with mausoleums, columbaria (communal burial chambers) and memorials.

The Tomb of the Scipios, begun in the early 3rd century BC, lay just inside the later Aurelian Walls. Further out stands the massive cylindrical Tomb of Caecilia Metella, built around 30-20 BC for the daughter-in-law of the general Crassus, and later turned into a medieval fortress. Christians dug extensive underground cemeteries beside the road, including the catacombs of San Callisto and San Sebastiano.

Moments in Roman history

The Appian Way was the stage for many moments in Roman history:

• 71 BC: after the defeat of Spartacus’s slave revolt, about 6,000 captives were crucified along the road from Capua to Rome, according to the historian Appian.
• 52 BC: the politician Publius Clodius Pulcher was killed in a brawl with the gang of his rival Milo near Bovillae, on the Appian Way. Clodius was himself a descendant of Appius Claudius.
• c. AD 60: the Acts of the Apostles describes Christians from Rome meeting the Apostle Paul at the Forum of Appius and Three Taverns, stations on the road, as he was brought to the city as a prisoner.

Later Christian tradition placed the meeting between Peter and Christ in the legend of Quo vadis? near the start of the road, where the small church of Domine Quo Vadis now stands.

Decline, rediscovery and the road today

Decline and rediscovery

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the road was poorly maintained. The Pontine Marshes flooded again and the section across them was largely abandoned for centuries. Travellers increasingly used the older inland route.

Popes revived parts of the road. Pius VI had the Pontine stretch rebuilt in the 1780s as part of attempts to drain the marshes. In the 1850s the architect and archaeologist Luigi Canina excavated and restored the first miles outside Rome for Pope Pius IX, setting fragments of tombs back up along the roadside.

The Appian Way today

The first stretch outside Rome, the Via Appia Antica, is protected within the Appia Antica Regional Park, established in 1988. Here visitors can walk or cycle on stretches of ancient paving, past tombs, the remains of villas such as the Villa of the Quintilii, the Circus of Maxentius and the catacombs. Some of the paving visible today is original, but much was relaid in modern times.

Further south, sections of the road and its monuments survive at Terracina, Minturno, Benevento and elsewhere. In Brindisi a tall Roman column near the harbour is traditionally said to mark the road’s end. In 2024 UNESCO added “Via Appia. Regina Viarum” to the World Heritage List.

By the numbers

Myths and facts

Myth: the road was built in a few years. Only the first section to Capua was laid out under Appius Claudius, and even that was probably a gravel road at first. Paving and extension continued for well over a century.

Myth: all the stones on today’s Appia Antica are Roman. Many original basalt blocks survive, but large parts of the visible surface were repaired or relaid in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Fact: it was not Rome’s only early road. The Via Latina already existed, but the Via Appia was the first major road built as a deliberate public project and named after its builder, a practice later followed by the Via Flaminia and others.

Timeline

• 312 BC: Censor Appius Claudius Caecus begins the road and the Aqua Appia.
• 296-293 BC: First recorded paving works near Rome, from the Porta Capena towards Bovillae.
• 268 BC: Colony founded at Beneventum, on the road’s later course.
• Early 2nd century BC: Road extended to Brundisium.
• 71 BC: About 6,000 followers of Spartacus crucified along the road.
• c. 30-20 BC: Tomb of Caecilia Metella built.
• AD 109: Trajan opens the Via Traiana as an alternative route to Brundisium.
• 1850s: Luigi Canina excavates and restores the Appia Antica near Rome.
• 1988: Appia Antica Regional Park established.
• 2024: UNESCO inscribes the Via Appia on the World Heritage List.

Why it matters

The Via Appia was a military road that became a model for an empire-wide network of more than 80,000 km of paved highways. It carried armies, traders, pilgrims and ideas, and its tomb-lined route outside Rome remains one of the most evocative ancient landscapes in Europe. Its builder’s other great project, the first of the aqueducts of ancient Rome, shows how one censor’s ambition helped shape the infrastructure of Roman power.