"All roads lead to Rome!" Roads were the lifeline of the Roman Empire, stretching from Britannia to North Africa — people settled along those roads; armies, travelers, goods, knowledge and power passed along them — into the furthest corners of the empire. To this day, the Roman road network continues to shape large parts of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.
Now, an enormous new digital research project is fundamentally changing the way we look at that antique infrastructure. The international academic team behind the Itiner-e project has created the first high-resolution open-data set mapping the entirety of the Roman Empire's road network. In all, they have been able to digitally map 299,000 kilometers (186,000 miles) of roads, crisscrossing about 4 million square kilometers of the former empire — almost doubling the length of those roads previously thought to have existed.
In order to digitalize the network, trusted sources were studied. Researchers scoured archaeological sites, travel journals and centuries-old road maps, such as the Tabula Peutingeriana. The historical clues found in these were then compared with modern aerial and satellite imagery to create the Itiner-e.
Traces of the previous division of lands (Centuriation) — recognized not by walls or ditches but rather by parcels, since the Romans equally divided new and conquered areas into orderly rectangular plots — the checkerboard patterns of which are still recognizable as paths, roads or boundaries today. Those patterns are still easily recognizable in aerial photos, cadastral maps and even on hikes; especially in northern Italy, southern France and Tunisia.
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