The following extracts are from my recent book, Roads to Rome published by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and Frances Lincoln in London (c)John Heseltine 2005. The photographs in this project describe a series of photographic journeys around modern Italy using the early Roman roads that every young child learns about at school.

PHOTOGRAPHS of ROMAN ROADS - ROADS TO ROME
A new book by John Heseltine

Here the most modern expressions of 21st century life are played out against an ancient Roman backdrop and when you travel on these ancients roads, many marked with modern signs bearing the ancient names, you feel a sense of travelling in years as well as kilometres. All the main cities that are linked by these roads are rich in history and culture, but the old routes also take the traveller through intensely interesting smaller settlements, as well as the seductive landscapes romanticised by .... Roman Empire itself which built straight paths to access its far flung conquests and received back through this early information superhighway power, wealth and cultural diversity. ..an expression of the journeys that have been made and are still made on these straight passageways through space and time...

...My own journeys through these roads began auspiciously in the summer of 1970 when hitchhiking eastwards from London. I had planned a relatively straightforward route, crossing France, Germany and Italy and on to Yugoslavia and beyond. This would have been easy with the luxury of a train ticket, but it was fraught with difficulties when confronted with the enforced economies of thumbing lifts. France and Germany were relatively easy, but the Italians didn't seem to like the look of me and passed me by in large numbers. One of the major lulls in my progress happened near Milan and provided me with ample time to reflect on my disenchantment with Europe in general as the carabinieri removed me from the entrance to the autostrada for the umpteenth time. Rescue came in the form of a streak of white Mercedes Benz 230 SL driven by Sophia Lauren, or possibly her double, who scooped me and my wretched rucksack off the approach ramp and bombed off in the direction of Brescia waving her family snaps at me in the hot 90 mph wind that whipped over the open car. "Nobody else would ever have given you a ride", she laughed. I am indebted to her trust in the dishevelled hitchhiker and her acceleration to my journey time across the country. It was at that moment that I started to love Italy.

Since that time, I have travelled around the country regularly, usually getting about by hire car and photographing places and things for numerous books and magazines about all things Italian. But the roads gradually became something of interest in their own right and seem now to have drawn together many complex strands to provide the unity that was needed for my own personal expression of what I feel the place was and is like. I have sought to create a collective sense of place, as far as one can sum up a varied and sophisticated nation in a few photographic images. I thought I would have to make many extra sorties to illustrate various sections of the route until I realised in planning this project that I had already been along virtually every mile and the roads had become a natural map of my personal vision of Italy. Sometimes consciously, sometimes not, I had already tried to put into images what I saw and felt as I went up and down these adventures into the interior of Italy. And yet, as with all journeys, the more you find out, the less you feel you know, the more you see the less you realise you have truly seen.

THE ROADS

To help hold the vast empire together, the Romans built a highly advanced system of roads. People had built roads long before Roman times and by about 1000 BC, the Chinese had begun to construct roadways between their major cities. The Persians built a similar road network during the 500's BC. Most of these early intercity links were little more than tracks, whereas the Romans constructed the first extensive system of paved roads. The most well known Roman roads were usually named after the Consuls who supervised their construction and they generally measured 16 to 20 feet (5 to 6 metres) wide and 3 to 6 feet (0.9 to 1.8 metres) thick. Several layers of crushed stone and gravel provided a base for the surface which was paved with stone blocks, fitted close together without the need for mortar, in turn covered with a more forgiving surface and usually finished with compacted gravel fashioned to a curve to allow water to run off. Milestones were erected and usually recorded the name of the Emperor responsible. Some names in particular recall a particular zeal for road building: Claudius, Domitian and Trajan who supervised road building with such authority and care, they remain possibly the most enduring legacy of the Roman Empire.

The Romans used their roads chiefly to transport troops and military supplies as well as to form a major communications link between Rome and its provinces, with messengers in horse-drawn carts using the roads to carry government communications. By the AD 200's, more than 50,000 miles (80,000 kilometres) of paved roads connected Rome with almost every part of its Empire. Roman coaches even had a device attached to the wheels to measure the distance covered and 30 to 50 miles a day was considered to be an average journey. Government and military officials travelled by state mail carriage known as the cursus publicus hauled by up to eight mules and stopping off at regular intervals for food and rest. However, during the 400's, with the Empire's decline Germanic tribes conquered most of the Roman territories in western Europe and with the decline of the Empire, the majority of Roman roads slowly fell into ruin and during the following centuries became little more than drovers' tracks.

In the years following the Renaissance, when road building and repair once again received attention, Pope Gregory XIII perhaps acknowledging the roles the roads had played in the dissemination of Christianity, authorised the construction of roads that would accommodate more modern coaches and a system of inns was established along the way. In 1580 Montaigne described his journey through Italy and the innkeepers who came out on horseback to meet carriages in order to persuade them to stay at their abodes where "Dining rooms are unknown the windows are large and h2ave no glass. If one closes the big wooden shutters to keep out the sun or the wind, then at the same time one also shuts out the light". One hundred and fifty years later, things weren't much better as De Brosses confirms in his travel journal "I have to speak ill of the road from Siena to Rome. It is vile, most vile and in itself bad enough to make to make every traveller despair."

There are many Roman roads throughout Italy and, indeed throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa, but the routes in this book have been chosen to illustrate the cultural diversity that still exists within Italy and, only just, allows the traveller to start a journey in a modern, urban, high-tech, sophisticated 'designer' environment and travel a couple of hundred kilometres into areas of relatively unchanged landscape where crops are harvested using age-old methods and where strangers are regarded with curiosity or even suspicion. In this way they offer an insight into the fusion of old and new that gives Italy its distinctive character and offer a natural framework to a photographic account of the varied regions of Italy. Moreover, the roads themselves and the beauty of their stones, as well as the topographical and archaeological features along their way are objects of fascination in their own right. They opened up the Roman Empire to the East just as now they offer us a link with the distant past, always with the beckoning call of Rome ...

... regional disparity, changing values, Italians' paradoxical love of their surroundings yet frequent disregard for environment, a modern youthful designer generation living against a stage set of ancient Italy, quite aware of of all that came before. The modern matrix of ancient routes offers some certainty within the changing complexity of modern Italy and its close links to its history. Intriguingly its was this network that enabled the Romans to create a unified Roman Empire in Europe and beyond, but now that the circle is closing again and another Europeanising movement developing, much to the concern of many Italians.

We see the old face of Italy under threat from Brussels, the world of mass tourism and globalised markets that bring McDonald wrappers even to the canals of Venice...the intense pride Italians have for their country and their commune is not always matched with a pride in the local scenery. Perhaps such a blot on the landscape is considered superficial and unimportant in the context of the thousands of years that man has managed the land of the Italian peninsula which is treated more a working environment and not something to consider for its own sake.

In urban areas the changes are equally obvious. The background to ancient sites is often a haze of pollution or smudges of dark smoke spoiling the deep azure sky. Distant views of large cities like Genoa or Naples are frequently obscured by a blanket of smog-like pollution and nearly every city, however elegant its centro storico, has a contrasting area at its perimeter where satanic factories and refineries belch out smoke and fire, a testament to the success of post-war industrialisation. Every nation has to produce wealth somehow and it should not surprise the culture pilgrims that somehow Italy cannot survive only as a museum ...

Nevertheless, none of this manages to overwhelm the strong character of Italian towns, whatever the size. The old buildings, monuments, family shops, market places and restaurants are highly valued and Italians would not want to see changes in the same way that have happened in small town America or the English high street where chain stores predominate and multinational brand is king. Whether or not successive generations can ensure the survival of this distinctive feature is a matter of concern to many.

Religion was one of the certainties that bound together the fabric of Italian society, but a loss of interest in divinity on the part of young people, together with a crisis in the Catholic priesthood means that fewer people are entering the churches are either as a profession or as a visitor...young people don't want to work at rural jobs anymore and so rural crafts such as the structure of a hay rick, for instance that used to vary from one place to another is disappearing.

Modern farming practices involving mechanisation of everything from hay cutting and baling to harvesting grapes and olive picking and for the tasks that have to be done manually farmers need to source labour from Eastern Europe all causing the management of the landscape to undergo fundamental changes. Brussels has also forced changes in traditional rural working practices so that many small producers find it is no longer possible to sell eggs or to use their time-honoured ways of making salami or cheese. These developments are all happening right now and few Italians would disagree that their country is undergoing a profound transformation and I hope that some of these photographs offer reminders of the rapid march of history and the new Italy that is emerging.

© John Heseltine