The Roads of Ancient Rome Visualized in the Style of Modern Subway Maps

Sasha Tru­bet­skoy, for­mer­ly 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, â€śtwo 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:

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Roman Roads and Bridges You Can Still Trav­el Today

An Inter­ac­tive Map Shows Just How Many Roads Actu­al­ly Lead to Rome

How to Make Roman Con­crete, One of Human Civilization’s Longest-Last­ing Build­ing Mate­ri­als


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Comments (4)
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  • Brendan Flynn says:

    Its a pity it’s not pro­vid­ed in a for­mat where it can be down­loaded eas­i­ly as there are numer­ous gamers and his­to­ri­ans who would real­ly appre­ci­ate this resource.

    Sad­ly it looks like it will be avail­able only if you pay for it, and I sus­pect that will not be cheap.

    Thats dis­ap­point­ing. Oh well back to the cur­rent resources.

  • Sagi says:

    It’s very inter­est­ing to hear and read about it. And a small ques­tion, how I can actu­al­ly down­load those maps?

  • Seraph says:

    It is cheap at $9 — I’m sure that’s no prob­lem for seri­ous his­to­ri­ans or game devel­op­ers. Peo­ple who actu­al­ly appre­ci­ate Tru­bet­skoy’s work should be fine pay­ing that. Plus, this arti­cle does pro­vide a free high-rez ver­sion

  • Helcur says:

    Don’t pay the 9, make your own with this ad ref­er­ence :) def not worth the 9 hah

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.