Not all roads lead to Rome: Study challenges what we think we know about Roman roads

A multidisciplinary team of researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark, Queen Mary University of London, and other European institutions analysed a dataset representing almost 300,000 kilometres of Roman roads across the former empire, creating the most detailed quantitative picture yet of how the Roman road network was structured.  

The study, published in Nature Communications on 15 September, challenges the idea that roads of the empire were uniformly straight and the famous saying that “all roads lead to Rome.” The analysis draws on "Itiner-e, The Digital Atlas of Ancient Roads" and applies network centrality, a method for measuring how important a given point is to overall connectivity, to model the empire's road system. 

"The study shows that Roman engineers adapted road construction to the landscape. While they favoured straight routes where possible, the roads were generally less straight than major modern ones. Mountains, valleys, rivers and settlements all helped shape their routes, while engineering techniques such as terracing, rock cutting, retaining walls and bridges allowed roads to cross challenging terrain,” says Dr. Adam Pazout from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, lead author of the study. 

"The research reveals a sophisticated network in which provincial capitals often acted as vital crossroads, mediating regional overland communications. Crucially, these results are robust when we account for gaps and inconsistencies in the archaeological records," adds Dr. Matteo Mazzamurro from Queen Mary University of London.  

The consistently high centrality of provincial capitals and main roads suggests that the development of the network involved complex, system-level decision-making. Rome itself was not the dominant hub of the Empire’s land transport network, and the late antique capital Byzantium was more central to empire-wide land mobility. 

The researchers found that the Roman road network still has a measurable relationship with modern transport infrastructure nearly 2,000 years later, though this relationship is uneven. Roman and modern roads show a moderate correlation across the former empire overall, but the strength of this relationship varies considerably from place to place, depending on local geography, the growth or decline of cities, rivers, mountain passes, and shifting political and economic priorities over the centuries. 

The research is significant because previous studies have often examined Roman roads region by region or focused on individual characteristics such as topography. This study brings together a highly detailed digital dataset covering the empire as a whole, allowing long-standing assumptions about Roman infrastructure to be tested quantitatively at an unprecedented scale.  

As with any large-scale historical dataset, the underlying road network is a reconstruction based on incomplete archaeological and documentary evidence, and coverage is not uniform across all regions of the former empire; the researchers accounted for this uncertainty directly in their analysis rather than treating the dataset as a complete record. 

Roman roads were far more than transport routes. They helped structure the movement of people, trade, technology, and beliefs across the empire. Understanding how this network worked offers a new way of exploring how infrastructure can shape societies – and how decisions made thousands of years ago can continue to influence the landscapes we live in today.  

You can access the full study via the following link.