The Ideal Roman Landscape of the Appian Way

The geographical region crossed by the Appian Way, one of the most important roads of the Roman World, and about 60 km from Rome was unique since it was mostly a marshy land (“Pontine Marshes”). The purpose of this chapter is to show that in Roman times, even when this area was assumed to have become sufficiently unhealthy for the Roman authorities to start a drainage work, this effort was not meant to be a (complete) transformation of the marshy land to get revenue from farming or to settle (new) colonists. The major objective was to provide some upkeep of (or of some) portion of the roadway itself. Consequently, the key factor in the case of the Pontine Marshes’ drainage action, even under the imperial government, was to ameliorate the Appian Way, not local cultivation. Recent hypotheses (mostly based on cartographic linear ground anomalies) about a supposed very early Roman occupation and exploitation of the Pontine plain by taming its marshes, don’t seem to be very effective.