Via Appia Antica

The first great road of Rome still runs south-east out of the city on its original line. Laid out in 312 BC under the censor Appius Claudius Caecus, the Appian Way carried armies, merchants and its own dead, and in 2024 the road from Rome to Brindisi entered the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Why it matters

Ancient writers called the road insignis, nobilis, celeberrima, regina viarum — queen of roads — and the title stuck. Begun as a military artery linking Rome with Capua and later pushed through Benevento, Venosa, Taranto and Brindisi, it became the model for the public roads of the empire and a backbone of Mediterranean exchange; a faster variant, the Via Appia Traiana, was added by Trajan in 109 AD. In 2024, at the World Heritage Committee's forty-sixth session in New Delhi, the road became Italy's sixtieth World Heritage site and the first candidacy led directly by the Ministry of Culture, uniting four regions, seventy-four municipalities, fourteen parks and twenty-five universities. The park authority frames the road in the city as an open-air museum, a designation that reaches back to the mid-nineteenth century under Pope Pius IX, when the antiquities along it were first protected as an ensemble.

What to notice

The first four kilometres of original roadway lie beneath modern streets near the ancient Porta Capena and Circus Maximus. Beyond the junction with the Via Ardeatina, beside the church of Domine Quo Vadis, an exceptionally intact straight stretch runs through the countryside, lined with tombs, columbaria and funerary gardens. The state-owned protected section extends for about twelve kilometres, from the modern road to Frattocchie in the municipality of Marino.

Context and history

A road is infrastructure, and this one organised a landscape for twenty-three centuries. Appius Claudius Caecus built the first section in 312 BC, originally for the movement of troops and state logistics; commerce and culture followed so quickly that the highway became the empire's template. In the medieval centuries traffic collapsed and monuments became quarries, but the road's prestige never died: popes and antiquarians restored the funerary rows as a gallery of Roman memory, culminating in the papal open-air museum of the nineteenth century. After the Second World War the threat of modern sprawl produced the urban park the park authority defends today, and the 2024 UNESCO inscription set the city section inside a single serial property running the length of the peninsula — the road to Greece and the Orient, as the candidacy put it.