How to read the Roman roads map
Each line on the map is a stretch of Roman road from the Itiner-e atlas of ancient roads, which shows the network as it stood around AD 150. This dataset maps 299,171 km of road in 14,769 segments across 39 countries. Tap or click any line to see its name (if it has one), how certain it is and what kind of road it was.
- Certain. Well documented, mapped to within about 50 to 200 m
- Conjectured. Known road, course less precisely documented
- Hypothetical. Route not pinned down, or existence uncertain
- Secondary road. Thinner line, any certainty
The styling is the honest part of this map. Itiner-e puts every segment into one of three groups. Certain roads are well documented and have been traced to within 50 m in mountainous terrain and 200 m on plains. Most roads fall into conjectured: they are identified road segments, but they are drawn with lower spatial accuracy because less is known about them. Hypothetical roads are identified but not pinned down, or sit where tracks were less fixed or several parallel routes may have existed (deserts and flood plains), or are suspected without enough evidence. These are Itiner-e's own definitions; you can read them on itiner-e.org.
The thicker lines are main roads (103,478 km) and the thinner ones are secondary roads (195,693 km). Of the road length, 94.1% joins up into one connected network when ends within 100 m are treated as meeting.
Roman roads near me
Press Near me on the map and it zooms to where you are, then lists the nearest Roman roads with their distances. Your browser will ask for permission first. If you would rather not share your location, type a town or city into the search box and the map will take you there.
Tap a road and the panel shows its name, how certain the line is, how long it is and the sources it was mapped from. Switch on the Modern roads layer to see today's roads underneath.
Roman roads in Britain
The map holds 11,574 km of Roman road in the United Kingdom: 10,124 km in England, 1,117 km in Wales and 344 km in Scotland.
The best-known British roads have a page each: Watling Street (352 km), Fosse Way (372 km), Ermine Street (421 km), Dere Street (273 km), Stane Street (93.3 km) and Akeman Street (119 km). In this dataset none of the length of any of these six is classed as certain, which means the exact line is not documented to the accuracy Itiner-e needs for that top category. Hadrian’s Wall also had a road behind it, the Military Way, which is not recorded as a named road in this dataset, so it has no page here.
Looking for Roman roads in England by county? Every UK county has its own page. Yorkshire is split into several ceremonial counties: North Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, East Riding of Yorkshire and South Yorkshire. The full list of countries and UK counties is one click away.
What Roman roads were, and how they were built
Roman roads were engineered routes built and maintained by the Roman state. They let soldiers, officials and messengers move quickly, and traders and ordinary travellers used them too. Towns, forts, ports and way stations grew up along them, and many modern places still sit on or near a Roman road.
Builders usually marked out a line that was as direct as the land allowed. They dug a trench, filled it with layers of stone, gravel and sand, and finished it with a surface of packed gravel or paving stones. Many roads were built higher in the middle, a shape called a camber, so rain ran off into ditches at the sides. Milestones beside the road gave distances. Where a hill or river was in the way, the road might curve round it or cross it by bridge or ford, so Roman roads were often straight but not always.
Why "all roads lead to Rome" is only half true
Plenty of roads did lead to Rome, and the Via Appia and Via Flaminia are two of them. But the map shows a network far bigger than a set of spokes around one city. Italy has 20,941 km of road in this dataset, which is 7.0% of the total and only 4th among the countries mapped. France, Turkey and Spain have more. Of the 39 named roads, 20 lie mostly in Italy, yet Italy holds only 7.0% of the mapped length.
Most of the network connected provinces to each other and to their local towns, ports and army bases. A traveller in Roman Britain, Anatolia or North Africa did not need to go anywhere near Italy.
Latin travelled with the empire and grew into French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian. See where Latin’s descendants are spoken today →
Where the data comes from, and how far to trust it
The roads come from Itiner-e, a free atlas of ancient roads by Brughmans, Pažout, de Soto and Bjerregaard Vahlstrup, published under a CC BY 4.0 licence (version 2024 1.3, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.17122148). Roman place names come from the Pleiades gazetteer and the modern basemap is OpenStreetMap. Every length, country figure and county figure on this site is calculated from the Itiner-e lines by a script that runs the same way each time. See all data sources and licences.
Here is the plain answer on accuracy. Only 2.7% of the road length (8,181 km, in 1,040 segments) is classed as certain. About 89.8% is conjectured and 7.4% is hypothetical. So think of the map as the best current picture of the network rather than a survey. Only 39 roads carry a name in the data, covering 4.2% of the total length, and the rest are unnamed.
Explore by road or region
Every named road and every country has its own page, with a map of the route, its length and the Roman places along it.
Longest named roads
- Via Egnatia (1,165 km)
- Via Hadriana (853 km)
- Via Claudia Augusta (686 km)
- Via Domitia (623 km)
- Via Appia (576 km)
- Via Popillia (Capua to Rhegium) (512 km)
- Via Postumia (462 km)
- Via Sebaste (462 km)
Countries with the most Roman road
Frequently asked questions
How many Roman roads were there?
This dataset maps 14,769 road segments with a combined length of 299,171 km, in 39 countries. That is what the Itiner-e researchers have identified and drawn, not a count of every road in the ancient world, and most of the lines are conjectured. Only 39 of the roads have a well-known name, such as Watling Street or the Via Appia.
Are any Roman roads still used?
Yes, in places. Some modern roads follow the line of a Roman road for part of their length, because the route suited the land and later travellers kept using it. Switch on the "Modern roads" layer on the map to compare the Roman lines with today’s roads, and see each road’s page for the modern towns near its route.
Can I walk a Roman road?
Often you can. Some stretches are now footpaths, bridleways or quiet lanes, and a few short sections of paving survive. Check the route on a current walking map before you set out, because the lines here are approximate (especially the dashed and dotted ones) and a Roman route is not always a right of way.
Why are some lines dotted?
The line style shows how certain the route is. Solid lines are well-documented roads, dashed lines are conjectured (the road is known but its exact course is less certain) and dotted lines are hypothetical (the route is not pinned down, or the road is only suspected). A thinner line means a secondary road rather than a main one.
Which is the longest Roman road on the map?
Of the roads with a well-known name, the longest in this dataset is the Via Egnatia, at about 1,165 km. This ranks named roads only. Most of the network has no name attached.
How long did it take to travel in Roman times?
It depended on whether you walked, rode or went by cart, and on the season and the road. Researchers have modelled this: ORBIS, from Stanford University (orbis.stanford.edu), estimates travel times and costs across the Roman world. We are building a journey calculator that works out the time between two Roman places along this road network. It is not ready yet, so we do not give figures here.
Data credits: see all data sources and licences.