Itiner-e: the Google Maps of Roman Roads

by helsinkiandrew • 9 months ago

195 45 9 months ago

b2ccb22• 9 months ago

Relevant paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-025-06140-z (Itiner-e: A high-resolution dataset of roads of the Roman Empire)

tevon• 9 months ago

This is my favorite type of hacker news content. Something really cool that I never would have stumbled upon myself.

I'm really surprised how built-up Gaul and Germany are here

xtiansimon• 9 months ago

If you like interesting and the occasional link fest rabbit-hole, have you seen metafilter?

And as I suspected, this was seen on Metafilter 11/6, the day before:

https://www.metafilter.com/210946/Interactive-Map-of-Every-K...

rclkrtrzckr• 8 months ago

Street view would be nice.

(SCNR)

zeristor• 8 months ago

“Home to Rome”

larodi4• 8 months ago

The title is wrong, as this is not Google's maps, but the beautiful and much more responsive Mapbox maps. Please fix your title.

Also it is high time for everyone to understand that not every map out there is goog's and more importantly - there are at least 5 providers of mappings software that do it either better or likewise well, and these guys' work needs to be respected. In fact it is very likely that gmaps would rate very low if one is to rank it considering usability (APIs including), licensing, speed and quality of the render.

1659447091• 8 months ago

The “the” and the “of” are of more importance in this particular sequence/structure: => “the X of Y”

the Google Maps is being used to frame or position the sites intent of a data rich maps site of Roman Roads

isolli• 8 months ago

Fair point, but respecting the page's own title would have been better and avoided much confusion (just look at the comments here):

"Itiner-e – The Digital Atlas of Ancient Roads"

Freak_NL4• 8 months ago

This is partly the fault of the researchers themselves for not including any attribution to OpenStreetMap, even though they are using OpenStreetMap data to render everything but the Roman roads.

larodi4• 8 months ago

And this is important stuff, as people should respect and pay proper attribution to those working painstakingly to actually enable everyone with all the wonderful mapping libs and content.

And Goog does none of this to deserve any credit.

INTPenis• 8 months ago

So much fun putting this map next to a modern one and looking at where I'm from in Croatia.

West of Jajce in Bosnia there's a ring of roads that hasn't changed for 2000 years.

I wonder if there's a missing roman settlement under Sarajevo, considering the roads there match so well and the size of the city.

9dev• 8 months ago

How far would I get when I planned a road trip using this? There are so many Roman roads still in existence (paved over of course), this might just be a usable map!

consp• 8 months ago

Nice map, though it uses the current river and land layout. Half of what was Batavia was inpassable wetland and the rivers followed a different path likely more following the roads.

noduerme• 8 months ago

Hug of death? I can't wait to explore the roads of Gaul tomorrow. I spent a great autumn in the village of Bétaille, Lot, and to walk the local roads you could imagine Roman legions fighting the army of Vercingetorix in the fields.

Freak_NL4• 8 months ago

Perhaps we can finally figure out the exact location of that one stubborn village which was never conquered. It should have a visible ring of roads linking the surrounding Roman outposts around it…

em-bee• 8 months ago

SPQR - Sono pazzi questi romani!

These Romans are crazy!

stevage• 8 months ago

As someone who works in web mapping, I have to quibble with "The Google Maps of...". This is just an interactive map - it doesn't have features that particularly resemble Google Maps, particularly navigation.

A bit of work on the UI would make this a really fun and interesting tool - currently it seems to be intended for people who know a lot about the dataset already.

wichert• 8 months ago

Navigation is supported, with travel times given for walking, ox cart, pack animal and horse. The feature is a bit hidden: you need to click the place marker at the bottom right.

mr_toad2• 8 months ago

Travel advisory: possible disruptions on the road due to armies of vandals.

countrymile• 8 months ago

Also worth looking at this very UK take:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44622543

Freak_NL4• 8 months ago

This project uses OpenStreetMap to render the (present day) natural features and (if enabled as a setting) the current road network.

Unfortunately, Brughmans, de Soto, and Pažout neglected to include the legally required attribution for this use of OpenStreetMap data (via Mapbox). This is a shame, because these kind of projects are great to show people that there is more than just Google Maps.

aarroyoc2• 8 months ago

As always with this kind of stuff, there are so many inaccuracies, at least in the parts I know of. Roads are mostly ok, although some of them are more like "suppositions" that real roads we have found. Let's take a look at the area around Valladolid: https://imgur.com/xMW6yiY

- Pintia is almost confirmed to be near the Duero/Douro river, much more to the south and to the east. It is one of the most explored pre-Roman settlements in the area and while there has not been a definitive proof, there are many hints that show that it's on the place I showed and not where it's shown on the map

- Amallobriga is also, for most historians, located in Tiedra, but it shows Tordesillas. As you can see on the map, the actual location of Tiedra is also a road intersection. The location in Tiedra is consistent with archeological evidence and with route books that show the distance from Amallobriga to other cities we know.

- Nobody really knows where Intercatia or Tela are. But note that a there's a big road intersection at the south. It is confirmed that there was a settlement but we do not know the name of it, several have been proposed. In any case, Intercatia is very difficult to be located as it is shown in the map with no roads going to it. Many archaeologists say it could be in the actual town of Paredes de Nava.

- I don't think there's any real evidence of a bridge that crosses the Douro/Duero river there. What we know is that there's a medieval bridge closer to Septimanca and that it could have had a Roman origin, but according to the map there's no road there.

SwiftyBug2• 8 months ago

I was wondering the same thing about the road crossing the Douro between present-day Vila Nova de Gaia and Porto. Was there a bridge there during Roman times? Interestingly, it would be right where the Luiz I Bridge is now.

aarroyoc2• 8 months ago

After a quick research, there's no evidence of a bridge there and it seems difficult to do even for Romans. But there could have been some people with boats in Cale to help cross the river and still be considered part of the road.

joeyates• 8 months ago

The route for the Via Cassia is at odds with all the literature on the subject.

Two macroscopic problems are:

1. The only variant given is between Bolsena and Fabro. There is nothing about later routes to the west of Valdichiana and to the left of the Arno.

2. The section between Arezzo and Cascia used the exact route of the modern Setteponti, which was certainly not the case.

Beyond these errors, every section I have checked in detail for the Cassia contains inexact info.

vinc• 8 months ago

Interesting, but it'd be even better if it was the OpenStreenMap of Roman Roads instead of Google Maps because like some already mentioned I could easily spot inaccuracies in my local area and a collaborative effort could fix that.

You can click on a road segment and get some info about it so the first step would be to add a way to contact its author to suggest improvements.

For example I know of some hidden ruins of a very ancient bridge where my local roman road crossed the river with two paths that show where the road on both sides would have been instead of where the road cross the river on the segment.

b2ccb22• 8 months ago

Relevant paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-025-06140-z (Itiner-e: A high-resolution dataset of roads of the Roman Empire)

larodi4• 8 months ago

Google is never mentioned in this paper.

MangoToupe• 8 months ago

? How did conversation about an interesting topic get this sidetracked

pcrh• 8 months ago

Nice! It's interesting to see the major travel hubs and how they can differ from modern ones, for example Durocortorum (Reims) and Augustobona (Troyes) in France, as well as Verulamium (St. Albans) in England.

It would be nice to be able to use Streetview or similar to see how the roads look today (where they still exist).

Cthulhu_• 8 months ago

This is a great thing to put next to e.g. voting maps, language, religion, etc - https://www.reddit.com/r/phantomborders/ is fascinating sometimes.

For my part, the Romans never went more than halfway up the Netherlands, meaning the north ("above the rivers") is culturally somewhat different from the south, although the cultures did converge over time. But "below" the rivers is still generally Catholic wheras "above" is Protestant. For example.

walthamstow• 8 months ago

The line on Great Britain is very clear. Scotland might not exist today if the Romans had conquered the whole island.

Brendinooo• 8 months ago

It might sound dumb to say, but modernity has abstracted away mountains and rivers enough that when I look at a map like this, I find myself just kinda fixated on the topography, how it shaped history, and how people worked around it when dynamite and airplanes and steel bridges weren't Things yet.

aswegs8• 8 months ago

Every road I clicked on was categorized as "conjectured", so no direct proof exists.

dragonwriter• 8 months ago

Source title is "Digital Atlas" not "Google Maps"; the change in the submission violates the HN guidelines against editorialization and preferring using the source title unless that title is itself misleading clickbait.

Maxsnijders• 8 months ago

Suspicious that there are so many roads around modern day research hubs (Paris, Israel, London) and not that many in Italy itself.

ErroneousBosh• 8 months ago

I've always thought that it was interesting the Romans built the Antonine Wall where it is, and declared that to be the end of the empire in Britannia.

There would have been a long march across a sinky, sucky, midgie-infested bog to the south, then a long climb up a hill that's just steep enough to be annoying, and then when you get to the ridge overlooking what's now the Kelvin Valley - where Bar Hill fort is - there's just another even bigger wetter bog with lochs to wade through, hoaching with midgies, and an even bigger set of very steep hills beyond.

Inhabited by angry armed locals.

You know what, lads, if Antonius wants the land to the north of it then Antonius can come and claim it for himself, okay? Who's with me? Build the camp here? Build the camp here, then.

And now, if you brought a Roman soldier 1900 years forwards, I wonder what they'd make of it? Nothing left of the empire, except a few weirdly straight roads a little north of Glasgow, some half-buried ruins that the local high school kids get taken to on field trips during the day and go up to and smoke weed at night, and a few of those local kids have bigger noses than you might otherwise expect.

throwup238• 8 months ago

That’s exactly why they built a fort there. It was miserable to get to and an easy place to spot the angry locals coming.

If you look at that landscape with a Roman officer’s brain (lead addled as it might be), it makes a lot of sense. The Antonine Wall sits on the narrowest useful neck of Britain, between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde, so you get a frontier from sea to sea with the minimum amount of digging and building. Bar Hill in particular is one of the highest points on that line; you schlep through bog and up an annoying slope precisely so your fort sits on a ridge with a commanding field of view over the Kelvin valley and the approach routes beyond.

The Romans aren’t thinking “this is the end of the world forever, we’re too lazy to go farther.” They’re thinking in terms of administratively useful lines. A frontier, in Roman terms, isn’t where patrols stop but where taxation and permanent stone architecture stop. They had marching camps and temporary posts further north and they pushed beyond this line in the Flavian period, and they continued to raid and campaign beyond it even with the Antonine Wall in place. But they wanted one clear, surveyable, defensible line they can tie into fleets on both coasts and run roads along. Hence the miserable hilltop with a great view.

It’s also politics. Hadrian had his nice sensible stone wall farther south. Antoninus Pius needed a military accomplishment to put on the resume, so he pushes the formal frontier forward and a new line, new forts, new distance slabs proudly recording how many Roman feet of wall each unit built. From that perspective, the legionary is not merely damp and covered in midges but also being used as a bullet point in the emperor’s performance review.

ETH_start• 8 months ago

It would be interesting to know if there are any modern economic implications from these ancient road networks. Like economic advantages that regions that had Roman roads 2,000 years ago, have today, with all other factors being held constant.

Itiner-e: the Google Maps of Roman Roads

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