The Roads of the Romans (Getty Trust Publications: J. Paul Getty Museum) First Edition

I was an army brat and I lived for some years in Europe as a kid. It seemed normal to me at the time, of course, but it wasn't until I was back in the States and in high school that it began to dawn on me just how insular the life experiences of many of my classmates were. This was especially true of history. To most of them, "history" was a theoretical subject, involving the American Revolution, and the Founding Fathers, and the Civil War, and various other iconic national experiences written with capital letters. But I had a friend in Rome whose family lived in a house that was older than the United States -- and they thought nothing of it. The bus I rode on to school traveled down streets the routes of which were twenty centuries old. That was what really got to me, deep down: The roads and the streets. They weren't museums, or even locations that people paid conscious attention to as encompassing the deep past -- not like the Pantheon or the Coliseum. That's when I knew I was going to be some sort of historian. Walk down a street in Italy or France or Germany, and you're traveling through time. Staccioli knows all about that feeling. This engrossing small volume (only about 130 pages) is filled with more than 100 color plates of the system of thoroughfares and highways constructed by Republican and Imperial Rome -- not the first road-building culture but certainly the greatest. The roads were what held the Empire together, politically and commercially, and "all roads led to Rome." Start at the Forum in the center of the city and travel in any direction -- up into Europe or down into the Mediterranean, east into Asia, or west to Britain -- the way you follow will almost certainly be laid atop an original Roman surface. The first ones were constructed not by a central bureaucracy but by individuals with private wealth, and by consular acts, almost entirely to facilitate trade. Later routes were constructed to accommodate military movement as well. That meant milestones, many of which survive, and bridges and gates and inns in every town and city the roads reached. Some routes became lined with family tombs, the ruins of which may still be seen. Gates and bridges often were built over in later centuries and many are still in use. The author shows you all of these, from all over Europe -- samples of all of them, anyway -- accompanied by detailed text that explains exactly what you're looking at and what it means. I wish I could plan a long summer vacation around this book.

I visited the Getty Villa and their antiquities collection this month. In their bookstore, I was reminded of how many great books about Ancient Rome and Greece have been written with the support of the Getty. This is one of them. It was very thorough yet didn't bog me down in dry academic verbiage. I could easily choose which parts interested me and skip the rest. What I skipped were the descriptions of which roads went where. I was interested in the background of why and how the roads were made and maintained, what rules existed about useage by whom and when. You get a real sense of what life was like for the citizens and slaves of the Roman empire as they all lived their daily lives using these roads. For some reason, I found the fact that Rome had serious traffic jam problems reassuring! This book was chock full of quality photos and contained a few drawings for clearer explanations. It also had a couple of nice, colored maps showing the Roman road system in what is now present day Italy and also the system that stretched across the entire Roman Empire. I have been to several Roman ruins in Rome, Turkey and Syria so have a general interest in the subject but didn't pay too much attention to the paved paths I walked on. I was very pleased to find this book much more interesting than I expected and wish I had paid much more attention to what was under my feet. The book's cover is very attractive and its overall material quality is high. It would make a wonderful addition to the library of anyone interested in Rome or be a great gift to any modern civil engineer.

This photo study of Roman roads is good, as far as it goes. What disappointed me is the scarcity of technical information on the design and construction of the remarkable network of roads that bound the Roman Empire together for centuries. Others have termed this a "coffee table book" which I agree with, hence the four star rating. Compared to Trevor Hodge's meticulous description of Roman engineering in "Roman Aqueducts and Water Supply" this book disappoints, sadly. Great photo study, though.