A multidisciplinary team of researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark, Queen Mary University of London and other European institutions analyzed a data set representing almost 300,000 kilometers (186,000 miles) of Roman roads across the former empire, creating the most detailed quantitative picture yet of how the Roman road network was structured.

Testing an imperial network

The study, published in Nature Communications on Sept. 15, challenges the idea that roads of the empire were uniformly straight and the famous saying that "all roads lead to Rome." The analysis draws on "Itiner-e, The Digital Atlas of Ancient Roads" and applies network centrality, a method for measuring how important a given point is to overall connectivity, to model the empire's road system.

https://phys.org/news/2026-09-roads-rome-roman.html