Via
Main roads in the Roman world
Via (plural viae) is a Latin term referring to main roads in ancient Rome. While via can be used to refer to any type of road in the Roman world, it more specifically refers to a road that began at Rome and extended outward to other parts of the Roman world. Roads such as the Via Appia - which stretched 360 miles south from Rome to modern-day Brindisi (ancient Brundisium) - connected different parts of Roman territory as it expanded throughout the Republican and Imperial periods, and the construction of roads was often one of the first priorities when the Romans took over a new province (Orsi, 2013). In total, the Romans built an estimated 53,000 miles of roads throughout their vast empire - about 11,000 more miles than the United States had of interstate highways in 1995 (Steiger, 1995). Roman roads were built in straight lines, and as a result they had to be carefully planned out before construction. They were also built to last, as the remains of many Roman roads can still be seen today throughout the Roman world. Romans built their roads using a three layer system: the first layer, called the rudus, was a layer of small broken up stone and crushed brick which filled part of the 30-60cm deep roadbed; the second layer, called the nucleus, filled the rest of the cavity with finely crushed stone and sand; and the final layer, called the pavimentum, consisted of smoothly polished stone slabs that paved the finished road. The road would typically slope down on either side from the center point to allow water runoff and keep the roads clear (Jaenicke, 2019). While viae often passed through the city they connected to, streets contained within a city were typically referred to as stratum (plural strata),which could be divided further into three subgroups: actus (smaller streets for travel on foot or horseback, plural acti), iter (streets only for foot travel, plural itinera), and semita (literally meaning “small iter,” plural semitae). While Romans were not the first to invent paved roads in the ancient world, they certainly made great leaps in road building technology, and employed their use to a more extensive degree than other contemporary ancient civilizations (Jaenicke, 2019).
Bibliography
Latin Dictionary Entry
Jay Brodzeller, 2022