In Focus: Via Appia

The Via Appia Antica, as it is known today, connected Rome to important towns in the south of Italy. It was the principal route to Capua from 312 BC. Appius Claudius Caecus as censor built and named this first section of the road. By 244 BC the Via Appia extended through Beneventum and Venusia, then continued onto Tarentum to Brundisium. It was fully paved by the time of the Gracchi. The Via Appia was thus a well-travelled route, and visitors coming into Rome from Brundisium along the Gräberstraßen (‘street of tombs’) of the Via Appia would have seen many burial monuments and tombs with expanding cemeteries behind them. Such a sight may have reminded Romans and visitors alike of their own mortality, an experience that is shared with us by the Roman writer Marcus Terentius Varro (116-27 BC), who, when discussing the etymology of the verb meminisse ‘to remember’ mentions monimenta ‘memorials’ on tombs along roads (viae) which admonish both travellers and readers alike, reminding them that they were indeed mortal (Varro Ling. 6.49).

Travellers may also have been emotionally affected by the continuous line of commemorative architecture whose monumental facades were also adorned with busts, statues, and inscriptions, as was Giovanni Battista Piranesi. His Via Appia Imaginaria (1756) not only conveys very clearly both the number and range of memorial types (however stylistic), but it also evokes the mystery and beauty of these monuments that captured the imagination of people on the Grand Tour. On the opposite page is Piranesi’s rendition of the Tomb of Caecilia Metella, whose titulus inscription proclaims her ownership of the tomb. Built in the late Republican period, it dwarfed everything around it. Caecilia’s tomb still provides the modern-day visitor to the Via Appia with a sense of the importance Romans placed on commemorating their lives through burial, and is well worth a visit.