Archaeology: Not all roads lead to Rome — exploring the Roman Empire’s road networks (Nature Communications)
16 September 2026
A detailed structural analysis of the Roman Empire’s entire road network is reported in Nature Communications, covering topographical information from nearly 300,000 km of roads. The findings suggest that Roman roads were not as uniformly straight as previously thought and highlight the long-term effects of Roman roads on modern towns and transportation systems.
At its peak in 117 CE, the Roman Empire covered approximately 5.5 million km2 across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, connected by a network of road, river, and sea transport. There have been long-held assumptions that Rome was located centrally in this network, that Romans tended to build straight, paved roads, and that present-day roads follow similar routes to Roman roads.
Tom Brughmans and colleagues studied the structural characteristics of Roman roads using their previously reported digital model of nearly 300,000 km of Roman roads, named Itiner-e. The authors analysed four key properties of the local landscape: average and maximum slope, elevation, orientation, and road “straightness”: these were then compared with a dataset of modern paved roads. Roman roads were predominantly straight where the landscape permitted, particularly in lowland regions such as in western Europe and North Africa. However, they tended to be less straight than modern roads due to technological and topographical constraints.
There is no region where Roman roads entirely predict the infrastructure of modern roads. Important cities such as provincial capitals were more centrally located in the road network than non-capital cities, serving as major local crossroads. The authors note that some cities such as Antioch, Ankara, and Byzantium were better located as central locations within the road network than Rome itself. Increases in road density to modern-day are most acutely seen around once-small population centres that have since grown to major metropolitan areas, including Birmingham, Madrid, and Paris. They also suggest that transportation routes in the Roman Empire were planned within individual provinces.
The authors note that the road data are not fully complete and that future work should incorporate river and sea connections to provide a more complete picture of transport infrastructure. However, these observations provide important evidence for examining how people, goods, ideas, and diseases spread across the Roman Empire, and its lasting influence on modern infrastructure.
- Article
- Open access
- Published: 15 September 2026
Pažout, A., Brughmans, T., de Soto, P. et al. Network science reveals the structure and lasting impact of the Roman road system. Nat Commun 17, 9551 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-75453-3
© 2026 Springer Nature Limited. All Rights Reserved.
