New Research

Researchers Have Analyzed the Roman Empire’s 190,000-Mile Network of Roads. Turns Out, Not All of Them Led to Rome

For a new study, archaeologists attempted to answer age-old questions about Rome’s roads, including how connected the capital was and whether current motorways trace Roman routes

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

September 17, 2026 10:10 a.m.

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“All roads lead to Rome.” Everyone knows the adage. But according to new research published in Nature Communications, the ancient Roman Empire’s sprawling highways weren’t as connected to the Eternal City, or quite as sophisticated, as that saying and other commonly held notions about them suggest. 

“All roads lead to Rome? They are all straight? We still walk Roman roads in the region today? These are widely held assumptions, even among academics,” Tom Brughmans, one of the study’s co-authors and an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, tells New Scientist’s James Urquhart. 

Such claims have prevented historians from interrogating the Roman road system, Brughmans tells the London Times’ Rhys Blakely. “We just assume that Rome was at the center of a spider’s web of roads, and that’s simply not true.” 

Last year, Brughmans and an international team of researchers created a digital, publicly accessible map of the Roman Empire’s nearly 190,000 miles of roads in 150 C.E. For their recent study, the researchers analyzed topographical data and historical context to make judgments about that network.

They aimed to gauge the ancient roads’ straightness and composition, which cities they connected and whether they remain in use. They concluded that the Romans built straight roads where the landscape allowed, that their major roads are “moderately positively correlated” with modern highways and that other Roman cities were better connected than the Eternal City.

“Rome itself was centrally located on the roads on the Tyrrhenian coast ‌of Italy,” Brughmans tells Reuters’ Will Dunham. “But ⁠when we consider all movement within the entire Italian peninsula, we were shocked to discover that the most central road actually follows the opposite Adriatic coastline, bypassing Rome altogether.” 

The first great Roman road was the Appian Way, which originally ran southeast from Rome for about 130 miles, along the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea, before it was extended to the Adriatic coast. It was commissioned by the statesman Appius Claudius Caecus in 312 B.C.E. and triggered a steady increase of road construction, which further ramped up when the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire in 27 B.C.E. Emperors began conquering and annexing foreign lands, from modern-day Turkey to Britain (the Roman provinces Galatia and Britannia, respectively). To promote trade and travel within and between them, leaders ordered legionaries to build roads.

“We found that provincial capitals were exceptionally well located on the ​roads in their province, facilitating effective provincial administration and tax collection,” Brughmans tells Reuters’ Will Dunham. In fact, the Roman Empire’s eastern capital, Byzantium—modern-day Istanbul—was much more connected to the wider realm than Rome. 

As for the roads’ engineering and composition, the researchers determined that Roman roads weren’t as “straight” as reputed. Although Romans “favored straight routes where possible,” they didn’t always carve the most direct route between points A and B, Adam Pažout, the study’s lead author and an archaeologist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, says in a statement from Queen Mary University of London. 

"The study shows that Roman engineers adapted road construction to the landscape,” Pažout explains. “Mountains, valleys, rivers and settlements all helped shape their routes, while engineering techniques such as terracing, rock cutting, retaining walls and bridges allowed roads to cross challenging terrain.”

Some Roman roads were indeed quite durable—paved with crushed and flat stone, lime cement and gravel, reports Reuters. They determined how Europeans traveled for a long time, well after the Roman Empire’s fall in the fifth century C.E., and their impact is indeed observable in modern road maps. 

As Pažout tells Reuters, Roman roads were used to facilitate continental communications through the medieval period, until the advent of 19th-century railroads and 20th-century highways, some of which eventually followed earlier Roman paths. For example, Spain’s longest highway, N-340, traces the cross-country route of Via Augusta, which the Roman Empire built in 5 B.C.E., Brughmans tells Reuters. 

“Interestingly, the correlation between the ancient network and the modern network shows that, in some ways, the Romans created the future geography of Europe,” Ray Laurence, a historian at Macquarie University in Australia, tells New Scientist. “The key limitation to this approach is that the road network was formed over 600 years, but little account for temporal differences has been included in the study.” 

Sonja Anderson is a daily correspondent for Smithsonian magazine who covers art, archaeology and culture, from newly discovered artifacts to the latest art heists.