The Roads to Rome: A History of Imperial Expansion

Inspired by original research and filled with color and drama, this is an exploration of two thousand years of history as seen through one the greatest imperial networks ever built.

"All roads lead to Rome” is a medieval proverb, but it's also true: today's European roads still follow the networks of the ancient empire—and these ancient roads continue to grip our modern imaginations as a physical manifestation of Rome’s extraordinary greatness.

Over the two thousand years since they were first built, these roads have been walked by crusaders and pilgrims, liberators and dictators, but also by tourists and writers, refugees and artists. As channels of trade and travel—and routes for conquest and creativity—Catherine Fletcher reveals how these roads forever transformed the cultures, and intertwined the fates, of a vast panoply of people across Europe and beyond.

The Roads to Rome is a magnificent journey into a past that remains intimately connected to our present. Traveling from Scotland to Cádiz to Istanbul and back to Rome, the reader meanders through a series of nations and empires that have risen and fallen. Along the way, we encounter spies, bandits, scheming innkeepers, a Byzantine noblewoman on the run, young aristocrats on their Grand Tour, a conquering Napoleon, John Keats, the Shelleys, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and even Mussolini on his motorbike.

Reflecting on his own walk on the Appian Way, Charles Dickens observed that here is "a history in every stone that strews the ground.” Based on vibrant original research, this is the first narrative history to tell the full story of life on the roads that lead to Rome.

Catherine Fletcher, a historian of Renaissance and early modern Europe, is the author of several books, including The Black Prince of Florence; The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance; and The Divorce of Henry VIII. She is a professor of history at Manchester Metropolitan University and broadcasts regularly for the BBC. Her impeccably researched and entertaining books have been featured with laudatory review coverage in both America and Britain. Catherine lives in Manchester, England.