The Roads To Rome

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

Brimming with life and drama, this is the first book to explore two thousand years of European history through one of the most important imperial networks ever built

'All roads lead to Rome.' It's a medieval proverb, but it's also true: today's European roads still follow the networks of the ancient empire and continue to grip our modern imaginations as a physical manifestation of Rome’s ‘extraordinary greatness’.

Over the two thousand years since they were first built, the roads have been walked by crusaders and pilgrims, liberators and dictators, but also by tourists and writers, refugees and artists. As channels of trade and travel, and routes for conquest and creativity, Catherine Fletcher shows how the roads forever transformed the cultures, and intertwined the fates, of a vast panoply of people across Europe and beyond.

The Roads to Rome is a magnificent journey into a past that remains intimately connected to our present. Travelling from Scotland to Cádiz to Istanbul and back to Rome, we meander and march through a series of nations and empires that have risen and fallen. Along the way, we encounter spies and bandits, scheming innkeepers, a Byzantine noblewoman on the run, young aristocrats on their Grand Tour, a conquering Napoleon, Keats and the Shelleys, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and even Mussolini on his motorbike.

Reflecting on his own walk on the Appian Way, Charles Dickens observed that here is ‘a history in every stone that strews the ground.’ Based on outstanding original research, this is the first book to tell the full story of life on the roads that lead to Rome.

©2024 Catherine Fletcher (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

Epic and witty ... Fletcher is a thoroughly enjoyable narrator because she peppers her learned prose with wry humour, first-person asides and comparisons between past and present ... The Roads to Rome is a nuanced and perceptive book that interrogates 'the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are'
Observer
Roman roads run everywhere, and Fletcher has been on most of them ... It has been her labour of love to crisscross an entire continent ... Fletcher's book is an exemplar of history as travelogue. It presents a familiar panorama - of Europe since antiquity - but from an unfamiliar, even original perspective ... The roads themselves are Fletcher's stars: sources of prosperity but also danger, stages on which to compete for and assert status, vectors of destiny that take men from where they cannot stay to where they must go ... The camaraderie she generates with fellow travellers, dead as well as living, engages and inspires.
Literary Review
Elegantly plotted ... It is no easy task to condense 25 centuries of history into 300 pages and Fletcher, whose area of expertise is Renaissance Europe, rises to the challenge ... For modern Grand Tourists, Fletcher's book will provide an enjoyable distraction when the journey to Rome gets dull
The Times
Fletcher has a knack for identifying the poignant and the picaresque, which keeps the book unpredictable and entertaining. Ms. Fletcher is a charming writer. There are plenty of memorable scenes and evocative images.
Wall Street Journal
Very readable ... these routes are almost a natural part of the landscape. The reader departs the book with a feeling that they have been there for an unimaginable time, travelled on by a cast of vivid characters. It is a compelling image, in an enjoyable book.
Financial Times
[A] rich narrative of the long afterlife of Rome's roads
New Statesman
[A] terrifically researched, sweeping study into the idea (or conception) of the Roman road
Unseen Histories
With verve and expertise, Catherine Fletcher has tramped the far-flung Roman roads of Europe and created a delightful, novel and authoritative history from the ground up.
author of BYZANTIUM
Past and present cleverly entwine in Catherine Fletcher's erudite, entertaining and infinitely readable journey along the roads that stitch Europe's history together.
author of THE LAND WHERE LEMONS GROW
This is history quite literally following in the footsteps of the past: covering and uncovering the ways in which the Roman road network has become part of the DNA of every society since. It's a magical and informative ode to the majesty and mystical power of the humble roadway.
Professor of Classics and Ancient History, University of Warwick

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