| Via Æmilia | The most celebrated of N. Italy |
| Via Æmilia-Scauri | Built long after the original Via Æmelia |
| Via Ameria | From Rome to Amelia |
| Via Appia | Of which the main trunk line ran from Rome to Capua |
| Via Aquilla | |
| Via Ardentina | |
| Via Aurelia | From Rome to Pisa |
| Via Cassia | |
| Via Flaminia | The Great North Road of the Romans |
| Via Latina | One of the most ancient of Roman roads |
| Via Laurentia | |
| Via Ostiensis | From Rome to Ostia |
| Via Salaria | Leading from Rome through the valley of the Tiber |
| Via Valeria | From the Tiber to the Adriatic at Ancona |
These ancient Roman roads were at their best in Campania and Etruria. Campania was traversed by the Appian Way, the greatest highway of the Romans, though indeed its original construction by Appius Claudius only extended to Capua. The great highroads proceeding from Rome crossed Etruria almost to the full extent; the Via Aurelia, from Rome to Pisa and Luna; the Via Cassia and the Via Clodia.
The great Roman roads were marked with division stones or bornes every thousand paces, practically a kilometre and a half, a little more than our own mile. These mile-stones of Roman times, many of which are still above ground (milliarii lapides), were sometimes round and sometimes square, and were entirely bare of capitals, being mere stone posts usually standing on a squared base of a somewhat larger area.
A graven inscription bore in Latin the name of the Consul or Emperor under whom each stone was set up and a numerical indication as well.
Caius Gracchus, away back in the second century before Christ, was the inventor of these aids to travel. The automobilist appreciates the development of this accessory next to good roads themselves, and if he stops to think a minute he will see that the old Romans were the inventors of many things which he fondly thinks are modern.
The automobilist in Italy has, it will be inferred, cause to regret the absence of the fine roads of France once and again, and he will regret it whenever he wallows into a six inch deep rut and finds himself not able to pull up or out, whilst the drivers of ten yoke ox-teams, drawing a block of Carrara marble as big as a house, call down the imprecations of all the saints in the calendar on his head. It’s not the automobilist’s fault, such an occurrence, nor the ox-driver’s either; but for fifty kilometres after leaving Spezia, and until Lucca and Livorno are reached, this is what may happen every half hour, and you have no recourse except to accept the situation with fortitude and revile the administration for allowing a roadway to wear down to such a state, or for not providing a parallel thoroughfare so as to divide the different classes of traffic. There is no such disgracefully used and kept highway in Europe as this stretch between Spezia and Lucca, and one must of necessity pass over it going from Genoa to Pisa unless he strikes inland through the mountainous country just beyond Spezia, by the Strada di Reggio for a détour of a hundred kilometres or more, coming back to the sea level road at Lucca.
Throughout the peninsula the inland roads are better as to surface than those by the coast, though by no means are they more attractive to the tourist by road. This is best exemplified by a comparison of the inland and shore roads, each of them more or less direct, between Florence and Rome.
The great Strada di grande Communicazione from Florence to Rome (something less than three hundred kilometres all told, a mere mouthful for a modern automobile) runs straight through the heart of old Siena, entering the city by the Porta Camollia and leaving by the Porta Romana, two kilometres of treacherous, narrow thoroughfare, though readily enough traced because it is in a bee-line. The details are here given as being typical of what the automobilist may expect to find in the smaller Italian cities. There are, in Italy, none of those unexpected right-angle turns that one comes upon so often in French towns, at least not so many of them, and there are no cork-screw thoroughfares though many have the “rainbow curve,” to borrow Mark Twain’s expression.
On through Chiusi, Orvieto and Viterbo runs the highroad direct to the gates of Rome, for the most part a fair road, but rising and falling from one level to another in trying fashion to one who would set a steady pace.