Alexander Meddings
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Verified WriterThe Via Appia Antica (Old Appian Way) is one of ancient Rome’s most overlooked attractions and a must-visit site for history buffs, intrepid explorers, and nature lovers. The Via Appia is an ancient road, perfectly preserved — at least in parts — despite more than 2,000 years of continuous use.
The ancients described the Via Appia as the Queen of Roads (regina viarum, for you cunning Latin linguists). Visit the Appia Antica today and you can quite understand why.
The Via Appia was one of the Roman Republic’s earliest and most strategically significant roads. Started (and practically completed) in 312 BC, it ran southeast from the Roman Forum to Capua, near Naples, and eventually Brundisium, modern-day Brindisi, in the southern region of Puglia.
Initially, the Via Appia served a solely practical purpose, allowing the movement of legionaries across the previously impassable Pontine Marshes to wage war with the Samnites to the south. Over time, the tombs of illustrious Romans and the underground catacombs of the city’s Christian and Jewish population came to line the Via Appia.
While you can walk from Rome’s city centre to the scenic beginning of the Via Appia in under an hour, you’ll save me time by taking public transport, hiring a bike, or joining us on a bike tour.
The 118 bus runs from downtown Rome to the Via Appia. You can catch it from outside the Colosseo metro station and Fori Imperiali (click here for other routes) and you’ll want to get off at the Catacombs of San Sebastiano. The bus runs daily (except for public holidays) and the timetable is as follows:
Bus 118 toute from Colosseo to the San Sebastiano Catacombs
Rome 118 Bus Daily Timetable
Cycling is the best way to experience the Via Appia Antica. Not only does it give you a better chance of reaching the end, near Ciampino airport, but it also gives you the freedom to pull up and explore the various villas and catacombs that line the ancient highway.
E-bikes offer one of the best ways of getting around Rome, especially during summer when temperatures often hover around the 30s°C. (80s/90s° F) But if you’re feeling brave and adventurous, there are plenty of places to rent pedal bikes too. We recommend EcoBike just on the Via Appia.
➡️ Tour the Via Appia with an Oxford historian
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Cycling down the Via Appia
Encountering traffic on the Via Appia Antica
Head southeast from the Circus Maximus along the Via Appia Antica. Walking to the end of the Appian Way would take you 119 hours. But because much of the Appian Way has been lost or built over, you can only walk about seven miles of it from Rome.
The surviving monuments run from the first to the ninth mile of the Via Appia. Only a fraction of the hundreds of tombs, catacombs, villas, bath complexes and mausolea that once lined the road survive, and often only a fraction of these monuments remains in any recognisable state.
Late 19th-century engraving of how the Appia Antica may have looked in antiquity
Here we've picked out our favourite attractions on the Via Appia, including what there is to see and the history behind them.
Known in antiquity as the Porta Appia (the Appian Gate), this was the gate through which travellers entered and exited the city following the construction of the Aurelian Walls in the 270s AD. Its two travertine arches are original while the cylindrical towers and bow windows were enhanced under the reign of the emperor Honorius in the 400s AD.
Porta San Sebastiano from inside the walls
Porta San Sebastiano from outside the walls
During the Middle Ages, this gate was known as Porta Domine quo Vadis, after the first words Peter the Apostle was said to have spoken to the risen Christ when he encountered him on the Appian Way ("Lord, where are you going?"). Its current name, Saint Sebastian's Gate, was adopted in the 1500s and named after the Christian catacombs nearby.
Between 1942 and 1943, Porta San Sebastiano's interior was renovated to become the residence of the Fascist Party secretary, Ettore Muzi. This former residence has now been converted into a museum to Rome's ancient walls: Il Museo delle Mura.
When passing through the gate, keep an eye out for a series of small round humps that pockmark the stone facing of the right-hand tower. These are apotropaic decorations, whose purpose was to ward off evil spirits and protect travellers along the Via Appia.
Originally known only as the “catacombs”, the Catacombs of Saint Sebastian is the site that has gifted us our word catacomb (deriving from the Greek κατὰ κύμβας, meaning “near the quarry”). This Greek term perfectly described the location of the burial sites, deep among the area’s stone quarries, which first sprung up around the end of the Republic.
During the early Empire a series of columbaria cropped up above the quarry to the north—burial places for the dead who could not be interred within the city’s sacred limits (which was practically everyone whose name wasn't Caesar).
The Catacombs of Saint Sebastian
From the third century at the earliest, the catacomb came to be known as in memoria apostolorum (“In Memory of the Apostles”) as they were believed to contain the relics of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. But even authors at the time knew this was hokum, so in the early Middle Ages the catacombs took on the name of another famous martyr, Saint Sebastian.
According to tradition, Saint Sebastian was a Christian praetorian guard who was tied to a tree and shot with arrows during the persecutions of the emperor Diocletian in 288 AD. You'll recognise paintings of him all around Rome, always looking more like his suffering an inconvenience rather than an agonising execution, while being pierced by arrows.
Niccolo Regnier, Saint Sebastian, 1620
Saint Sebastian looking like he just can’t even while being pierced by arrows.
Saint Sebastian, pierced yet resolute in his final trial
Spanning three levels, this warren of catacombs was initially home to slaves, freedmen, and citizens. Later the catacombs and its mausoleums later became the eternal resting places of Rome’s wealthier inhabitants and its Christian population.
The Villa of Maxentius is the name given to the imperial residency, dynastic mausoleum, and chariot-racing track (the best-preserved and second largest in Rome after the Circus Maximus) situated almost two miles outside Rome's Aurelian Walls.
Reconstruction of Maxentius' Villa complex
During the short reign of the emperor Maxentius (306 – 312 AD) the residency was converted into the official imperial palace. Years of political strife, and a high turnover rate of short-lived emperors, had seen the official imperial residence on the Palatine fall into disrepair. And seeking to distance himself from violent past traditions, and wanting to establish himself and his dynasty as something new and longer lasting, Maxentius chose the site of this villa just outside Rome’s walls.
After Maxentius's violent death at the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312 AD, his rival Constantine did all that he could to destroy Maxentius’s memory. While this didn’t extend to him razing the villa complex on the Appian Way, the archaeological record does suggest he abandoned it, leaving it vulnerable to the decaying effects of the elements.
The best-surviving structures of this imperial complex are the circus and mausoleum.
Built at the beginning of the fourth century AD, the Mausoleum of Romulus does not contain the remains of Rome’s legendary founder (who, according to legend, was buried beneath Lapis Niger in the Roman Forum) but of the emperor Maxentius’s infant son, Valerius Romulus, who drowned in the Tiber in 309 AD.
The architecturally astute among you might notice that its form resembles other mausoleums in Rome (Augustus' and Hadrian's, which is now Castel Sant'Angelo) and the vaulted dome of the Pantheon.
External view of Romulus’ Mausoleum
Inside the Mausoleum of Romulus
There's a good reason for this. Maxentius was a usurper, an illegitimate emperor—the Stannis Baratheon of the Roman Empire. By modelling his family mausoleum on the great monuments of Augustus and Hadrian (two 'good' emperors), he lent legitimacy to his claim as the man who would revive Rome's Golden Age. ('Make Roman great again', as we might say today).
Maxentius' circus is the best-preserved chariot tracing track in Rome and its environs, and the second-largest track in the capital after the Circus Maximus. Despite its grandeur, to the best of our knowledge it was only used once—for the funerary games of the emperors son, whose remains rested within the mausoleum.
The Circus of Maxentius in antiquity
The Circus of Maxentius today
As well as the overall shape, the most standout features are the two towers, which contained the mechanism of the carceres (starting gates) which released the charioteers.
The first monument you'll see when you disembark the bus at the Catacombs of San Sebastiano is the Mausoleum of Caecilia Metella. This is the only burial monument to a woman that’s survived from antiquity.
But who was Caecilia Metella?
Well, apart from her name, and the period in which she lived (1st century BC), the truth is that we don't know. As is so often the case with women of the ancient world, Caecilia's own personality, attributes and achievements are lost to history—relegated to obscurity by the reputations of the men around her.
The Tomb of Caecilia Metella Today
The Tomb of Caecilia Metella in the 20th century
All we can piece together of her life comes from the dedicatory inscription on the monument's tower: CAECILIAE | Q•CRETICI•F | METELLAE•CRASSI. She was the daughter of one Quintus Caecilius Metellus Creticus, whose crowning professional achievement was being the man who conquered Crete.
Caecilia was also the daughter-in-law of Marcus Licinius Crassus, the man who put down the Spartacus Revolt, the awkward third-wheel in the First Triumvirate of Julius Caesar and Pompey Magnus, and one of the richest Romans that ever lived. Crassus met a particularly sticky, Game of Thrones-type end after losing a battle against the Parthians; in a nod to his insatiable thirst for wealth, he had molten gold poured down his throat, was decapitated, and had his head used as a theatrical prop in a rendition of Euripides' play, the Bacchae.
So here’s the golden question 🥲: with such prestigious men in the family, why was this mausoleum dedicated to Caecilia? Could she have wielded some hidden influence that never made it into the history books? Could her strength of character have been such that she was the natural focal point of the dynastic tomb? Without further evidence, we'll never know (though this doesn't mean the question isn't worth asking).
The mausoleum survives so intact today because it was converted into a castrum (a fortified camp) in the 1300s. Bear in mind while you walk the Via Appia that this would once have been one of many such structures that lined the length of the road.
The villa is open daily from 9 am until an hour before sunset. Tickets cost €8, are valid for 3 days, and also grant you access to the Villa of the Quintilii and Capo di Bove.
Just off the fourth milestone on the Appian Way stands one of the saddest surviving monuments from antiquity. It consists of little more than a Latin inscription affixed to the remains of a brick wall burial chamber, but the inscription is a Latin poem documenting a father’s grief at the death of his two children.
The Tomb of Sextus Pompeius Justus
Latin inscription on the tomb of Sextus Pompeius Justus
The Latin is patchy—as you can see. But we can glean enough information to make this a monument of considerable pathos. It starts with the line Hic soror et frater viv(entis) (damn)a pa(re)ntis aetate in prima saeva rapina tulit, which translates as 'Here lie a brother and sister, stolen from their wretched parent in the prime of their lives.
The father, Sextus Pompeius Justus, names his daughter as Pompeia; his son as Sextus Pompeius. He talks about the cruel fates stealing his children from him, forcing him to consign them to a funeral pyre that should, by all rights, have been reserved for him.
The poem builds to Quanta iacet probitas, pietas quam vera [sep]ulta est, which translates as something like, “How much probity lies here; how much true love for their parent lies buried?” It finishes with the father’s lament that he cannot live with the loss, and his plea for the infernal gods to now show mercy and come for him.
Such is the scale of the Villa of the Quintilii that when locals began excavating it in the 17th century they called it Roma Vecchia, “Old Rome”, in the belief they had uncovered another city.
The Villa of the Quintilii
Fed by its own aqueduct, the largest residence in Rome’s outskirts after Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli incorporated several marble-clad residences, reception areas, bathhouses, steam rooms, and even housed a toilet with a throne and a latrine spacious enough for a small family. It had no shortage of arable land either—unsurprising given that the two aristocratic brothers who built it, Sextus Quintilius Valerius Maximus and Sextus Quintilius Condianus, both wrote books on agriculture.
The Quintilii brothers enjoyed illustrious careers under the zen philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius but fell foul of his son, Commodus (the horrible one in Gladiator played by Joaquin Phoenix). Jealous of their wealth and status, and determined to acquire their villa for himself, Commodus had the Quintilii brothers accused of treason in 182 AD. A show trial found them guilty, the brothers were put to death, and their villa was transferred to the emperor.
The villa is open daily from 9 am until an hour before sunset. Tickets cost €8, are valid for 3-days, and also grant you access to the Mausoleum of Caecilia Metella and Capo di Bove.
Like most building projects in Roman history, the Via Appia was born out of war—specifically the Romans' desire to defeat their pesky southern neighbours, the Samnites. Fierce warriors, the Samnites were proving particularly difficult to put down, using the hilly terrain and marshy swampland south of Rome to hinder the advancing legions.
To facilitate ease of movement for the Roman legions and their supplies, the Romans decided to construct a gravel-road sunning south, bridging the Pontine Marshes and penetrating into Samnite territory. The man in charge of overseeing such an ambitious project was Appius Claudius Caecus, Appius Claudius 'the Blind'.
Appius Claudius was also responsible for building Rome's first aqueduct: the Aqua Appia. Construction started on the road in 312 BC, and most work was finished the same year.
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Appius Claudius Caecus entering the Senate House
A stretch of the Via Antica just outside Rome
Rome's first road was a roaring success. Within a year the Romans forced the Etruscans into signing a treaty, and in 304 BC the legions brought the Samnites to heel. And everyone lived happily ever after—as long as they happened to be Roman.
Whether because of the Kirk Douglas classic or the more recent sex-and-sandals TV series, everyone has heard of Spartacus. He was ancient Rome’s most famous gladiator, a Greek slave who almost brought down the Republic, and a fearsome warrior who humbled Rome’s legions.
But we know remarkably little about the man himself.
Kirk Douglas as Spartacus
Poster for the Australian TV series Spartacus Blood and Sand
We think Spartacus hailed from Thrace in Northern Greece, and that he was enslaved by the Romans during their conquests in Greece during the 1st century BC. We know for sure that he never fought in Rome—nor on the Colosseum's Arena, which he pre-dated by around 150 years, but in Capua, near Pompeii, the original terminus of the Via Appia.
We know next to nothing about Spartacus’ life in Capua. What we do know is that in 73 BC, he and around 70 others managed to escape from their Gladiator School in Capua. They fought their way to freedom with utensils seized from the kitchen before stocking up on heavier weapons by raiding a cart riding down the Via Appia.
What followed was a slave revolt that snowballed in scale. Spartacus and his fellow slaves roamed from town to town, bringing more and more slaves to their cause, and when you consider that slaves accounted for more than a third of Italy’s population, we’re talking significant numbers.
There's an irony that Spartacus and his men were able to exploit the mobility the Via Appia afforded the legions, and made Rome so strong, and use it against the Roman Republic, travelling from town to town as they rallied Rome's slaves. What started as just another slave revolt soon became an embarrassment for Rome, and then a worry, and then a major concern as Spartacus' numbers swelled to 70,000.
The Senate sent legions to put down the rebels, who had taken up position on Mount Vesuvius. But the legions suffered several crushing defeats, the likes of which they had not suffered since the time of Hannibal. Eventually, the Senate entrusted the task of destroying the revolt to Marcus Licinius Crassus (whose daughter-in-law's mausoleum still stands on the Via Appia). In 71 BC, Crassus marched south with 40,000 well-trained legionaries to put the rebels down and make an example of them.
Spartacus' forces retreated from Vesuvius, making their way towards the southern coast of Italy at Brundisium (Brindisi). But from here there was no escape. Caught between the sea and Crassus' advancing forces, and betrayed by pirates who Spartacus had begged to transport them across the Adriatic, the rebels' discipline broke down.
The Death of Spartacus by Hermann Vogel
Fedor Bronnikov Crucifixion on the Via Appia
Crassus defeated Spartacus' men in battle near modern-day Senerchia. Most of our sources say Spartacus himself was killed in battle, but his body was never found. As for the 6,000 or so survivors from the rebellion, at Crassus' command, they were crucified along the Via Appia from Rome to Capua - a stark reminder to anyone harbouring ideas to rise up against Rome.
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