The Roads to Rome by Catherine Fletcher

The Roads to Rome: A History of Imperial Expansion

By Catherine Fletcher

Pegasus Books 2024

Readers won’t need more than one page of historian Catherine Fletcher’s The Roads to Rome to realize that they’ll be getting both more and less than what’s implied in the book’s subtitle, “A History of Imperial Expansion.” The Roads to Rome does indeed begin with the Appian Way, the ancient world’s most famous Roman road, but Fletcher immediately makes clear her intention to write a more personal,  more impressionistic account than something readers might find in, for instance, the seminal English-language popular narrative on the subject, The Roads That Led to Rome by Victor Von Hagen.

That book appeared nearly 60 years ago and toured the 250,000 miles of roads that criss-crossed first the Republic and then the Empire. Fletcher definitely has some similar ideas, but not only is her book’s remit wider (medieval mystics, crusaders, modern armies, and tourists from all ages fill these pages), but it’s filled with flashes of color, as when Fletcher is reflecting on the Appian way. “There’s a special light here, a pink haze that clears to reveal ruins in red brick, their lines interrupted by intricate patterns, the secrets of their engineering,” she writes. “Sometimes the trees sway in a breeze: sometimes the prevailing winds impart to them a permanent direction.”

This personal element crops up at every stage of the book. When she describes Montaigne working to get a pass certifying his plague-free status so he can enter Verona, Fletcher naturally thinks of a more recent pestilence. “I felt some sympathy with Montaigne when, returning from my first trip to Rome for research on this book, I was stung by a change in the rules for coronavirus testing, which left me £20 out of pocket,” she recalls. “While I avoided all but two days of quarantine, historically it was common in Italy, especially during outbreaks of plague.”

In these pages, readers meet the sons of aristocracy on their Grand Tours, workers on their way to market, and writers wheezing about how old the paving stones are, Fletcher herself being one of those writers. “This is a world of layers, a palimpsest of history,” she writes in one such passage. “Travellers have come here, walked or ridden or driven, for over two millennia.”

Ancient Roman history features 2000-year-old complaints about the state of the roads (“owing to the rascality of the contractors and the remissness of the magistrates”), and every more modern writer has seen fit to indulge in a rhetorical flourish if they so much as come within sight of a Roman milestone. Fletcher finds many of these flourishes, as the one from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, which notes that  “Old Roman toil was perceptible in the foundations of that massive bridge; the first weight that it ever bore was that of an army of the Republic.”

But the book ends as it begins, in the more intimate shades of memoir, as Fletcher’s train approaches Rome (in a perhaps unintentionally ironic commentary on the very real homicidal dangers of 21st-century Roman roads, there’s a fair bit of train travel in these pages):

At Caserta, it stops almost right outside the Reggia, the royal country residence outside Naples, once Allied headquarters. From there north, the railway runs closer to the Via Casilina than to the Appia, up the Liri valley, passing to my left haunted mountains with their wartime cemeteries. Step out of the train at Temini. I’ve been here often enough that I don’t mind the lack of view. Ignore the buses, take a taxi. I’m in Rome.

The end result of this combination of history and travelogue is a wonderfully balanced and in every chapter turns The Roads to Rome into something more than a simple Baedeker for cart-wheel grooves and pilgrim sandal-prints, into something much closer to a personal history of the glories and miseries of all roads leading to Rome.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News