Sasha Trubetskoy, an undergrad at U. Chicago, has created a “subway-style diagram of the major Roman roads, based on the Empire of ca. 125 AD.” Drawing on Stanford’s ORBIS model, The Pelagios Project, and the Antonine Itinerary, Trubetskoy’s map combines well-known historic roads, like the Via Appia, with lesser-known ones (in somes cases given imagined names). If you want to get a sense of scale, it would take, Trubetskoy tells us, “two months to walk on foot from Rome to Byzantium. If you had a horse, it would only take you a month.”
You can view the map in a larger format here. And if you follow this link and send Trubetskoy a few bucks, he can email you a crisp PDF for printing. Find more focused, related maps by Trubetskoy right here:
- The Roman Roads of Britain Visualized as a Subway Map
- The Roman Roads of Spain & Portugal Visualized as a Subway Map: Ancient History Meets Modern Graphic Design
- All the Roman Roads of Italy, Visualized as a Modern Subway Map
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Note: This map first appeared on our site back in 2017.
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