Appian Way: Appius the Blind, 6,000 Crosses and a Barefoot Olympic Gold

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At the 1960 Rome Olympics, Ethiopian runner Abebe Bikila won the marathon barefoot on the basalt of the Via Appia, the road the poet Statius called the Queen of the Long Roads. It began in 312 BC, when Rome was stalled in the Samnite Wars by the malarial Pontine Marshes. The censor Appius Claudius Caecus, whose cognomen means blind, bypassed the Senate to build the road and the Aqua Appia aqueduct. Engineers dug a trench, laid mortar and stones, then gravel bound by lime and volcanic pozzolana, and topped it with interlocking basalt blocks that Procopius said looked grown together. A causeway of about 19 miles crossed the marsh, and by 162 BC a canal ran alongside it. By 264 BC the road reached Brundisium.

King Pyrrhus of Epirus marched up the road toward Rome but turned back rather than risk the marshes, and in 275 BC the Romans beat him at Maleventum, which they renamed Beneventum. After Spartacus's revolt, Crassus crucified 6,000 captured slaves along roughly 120 miles between Rome and Capua, about one every 100 feet. In World War II, Allied troops landing at Anzio were pinned in the drained Pontine Fields by Germans in the Alban Hills. Pope Pius VI restored the road, and the parallel Via Appia Nuova of 1784 spared the ancient route. A 1951 ring road cut it in two before a tunnel rejoined it, and in July 2024 it joined the UNESCO World Heritage List.

• The first stretch ran 132 Roman miles to Capua, the ally Rome had been unable to reach.
• The roadbed was cambered so rain drained into side ditches, with sidewalks for pedestrians.
• Emperor Trajan added the Via Traiana branch to ease the rough journey to Brundisium.
• Professor Giuseppe Lugli used aerial photogrammetry to trace the lost southern route, then a cattle track called La Tarantina.
• Today 16 kilometers can be walked continuously, and one 62-kilometer section is Europe's longest straight road.