The Roads of Ancient Rome Visualized in the Style of Modern Subway Maps

Sasha Tru­bet­skoy, an under­grad at U. Chica­go, has cre­at­ed a “sub­way-style dia­gram of the major Roman roads, based on the Empire of ca. 125 AD.” Draw­ing on Stanford’s ORBIS mod­el, The Pela­gios Project, and the Anto­nine Itin­er­ary, Tru­bet­skoy’s map com­bines well-known his­toric roads, like the Via Appia, with less­er-known ones (in somes cas­es giv­en imag­ined names). If you want to get a sense of scale, it would take, Tru­bet­skoy tells us, “two months to walk on foot from Rome to Byzan­tium. If you had a horse, it would only take you a month.”

You can view the map in a larg­er for­mat here. And if you fol­low this link and send Tru­bet­skoy a few bucks, he can email you a crisp PDF for print­ing. Find more focused, relat­ed maps by Tru­bet­skoy right here:

• The Roman Roads of Britain Visu­al­ized as a Sub­way Map
• The Roman Roads of Spain & Por­tu­gal Visu­al­ized as a Sub­way Map: Ancient His­to­ry Meets Mod­ern Graph­ic Design
• All the Roman Roads of Italy, Visu­al­ized as a Mod­ern Sub­way Map

Note: This map first appeared on our site back in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“The Won­der­ground Map of Lon­don Town,” the Icon­ic 1914 Map That Saved the World’s First Sub­way Sys­tem

Design­er Mas­si­mo Vignel­li Revis­its and Defends His Icon­ic 1972 New York City Sub­way Map

Fash­ion­able 2,000-Year-Old Roman Shoe Found in a Well

The Rise & Fall of the Romans: Every Year Shown in a Time­lapse Map Ani­ma­tion (753 BC ‑1479 AD)