Itiner-E: the Google Maps of Roman Roads

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.

    Itiner-e: the digital atlas of ancient roads © 2024 by Brughmans, Pažout, de Soto and Bjerregaard Vahlstrup is licensed under CC BY 4.0

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

Also worth looking at this very UK take:

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

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.

Street view would be nice.

(SCNR)

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

“Home to Rome”