All Roads Lead to Rome

On a journey down the Via Appia—Italy’s first highway—Erica Firpo and her husband retrace the past, one archaeological site at a time.

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ONCE AGAIN, I had lost my husband under an ancient arena. On a clear day last September, Darius, an archaeologist, disappeared into a maze of crumbling stone corridors under the Amphitheater of Capua, the second-largest arena in antiquity after Rome’s Colosseum. This is our normal. Often, we head into an archaeological site together—crawling through aqueducts, exploring acropolises—and Darius doesn’t come out for hours.

Capua was one of the first stops on our five-day journey tracing the ancient Via Appia, dubbed “the Queen of Roads” by the Latin poet Statius. Built between 312 BC and the fourth century AD, it was Italy’s first superhighway, beginning just south of the Colosseum and ending in the port of Brindisi, Puglia, with monuments like military outposts and mausoleums holding prominent figures (such as early popes) along the way. In 71 BC, 6,000 of the soldiers who followed the slave-turned-rebel Spartacus were crucified along this very route. In 2024, UNESCO added the road that carried an empire to its World Heritage list. “The Appia was built by the Roman military one mile at a time as they conquered city after city,” Darius told me. “A 335-mile statement of confidence—and control.”

Over the 25 years we’ve lived in Italy, Darius and I have visited fragments of the road, walking, driving, and even biking it. Some stretches still appear in their original form, ancient stones and all. The most famous is the eight-mile sweep of original basalt that begins at the third Roman milestone, the Mausoleum of Cecilia Metella, and is shared today by walkers, cyclists, and the cars of those who have homes there. Some segments have been absorbed by cities, as in the main piazza in Terracina, while other portions surface as mere fragments, or are preserved within archaeological parks. But the majority has been paved over by a modern asphalt highway, the Strade Statale 7 Via Appia (SS7), which makes an excellent route for a history-filled road trip.