. 
’ 
: 
H.—ANTHROPOLOGY. 141 
instead the Via Traiana, which Trajan built as an alternative route to 
Brindisi, following an older mule-track of which Strabo speaks. It must 
have been completed in 109 B.c. and it reached the coast at Barium, the 
modern Bari, which, we may remember, lay on Horace’s route—though 
he did not follow the Via Appia far beyond Beneventum, nor yet the later 
Via Traiana, but took a third route. 
The road passes through some difficult country with frequent ups and 
downs, and there are a number of bridges in concrete faced with fine 
brickwork, stonework being used sparingly, and then only at the base 
of the piers. These bridges are all 24 Roman feet wide, which is above 
the usual standard width (14 feet) of the Via Appia and other Roman 
highroads—though even they widened out somewhat at the bridges. 
From the summit, about 3,000 feet above sea-level, there is a long winding 
descent, the Buccola di Troia, to the city of Troia, the ancient Aecae, with 
its fine cathedral. Here we enter the regna arida Dauni and the plain of 
Apulia. The road crossed two rivers, the Cervaro and the Carapelle, both 
of which have changed their course, and so left their bridges high and 
dry in the fields. They are, from the great width of the valleys and the 
character of the streams, which are wide and shallow—in fact, almost 
dry except in times of flood, when they carry a great quantity of water— 
structures of great length. The first is about 280 metres in length, about 
half of which is accounted for by the bridge proper, a structure with at 
least fourteen arches, the principal one having a span of about fifteen 
metres. The second is much longer, beginning with a causeway 200 or 
300 metres long; then follows the bridge proper, some 200 metres long, 
with about ten arches; and then follows a causeway about 250 metres 
long, with supporting buttresses on each side. 
We have mentioned the Via Latina as joining the Via Appia at the 
bridge over the Volturnus. Its straightness of line shows that it, like 
the Via Appia, was constructed as a military highway (the earlier tracks 
which these two roads have obliterated may one day be found by air- 
photography), and it may date from a slightly earlier period. It led in 
the first place to the depression between the inner and outer ring of the 
Alban volcano below Tusculum, and it passed through the rim of the 
larger crater by the Pass of Algidus, through a narrow cutting which is 
still clearly to be seen. After its descent from this pass it followed the 
valley of the Sacco, and there are no remarkable works of engineering 
along it until we come to a branch road between it and the Via Appia from 
Teanum to Minturnae by way of Suessa, the modern Sessa Aurunca. 
Here we find a remarkable bridge, now known as the Ponte Ronaco, with 
more than twenty arches, which are in two tiers in the centre. The 
pavement on the top is still preserved. The construction is in brick-faced 
concrete. 
We may turn now to the Via Flaminia,’ the “ great north road,” of 
ancient Rome, built by Gaius Flaminius during his censorship in 220 B.c., 
to provide rapid means of communication between the capital and the 
citizen settlers with whom the newly conquered ager Gallicus in the Po 
valley was to be peopled, and to keep in touch with Ariminum both as a 
defence against Gallic inroads and as a starting-point for future conquests. 
Its great importance is shown by the fact that even under the late 
7 See the article by Mr. R. A. L. Fell and myself in Journal of Roman Studies, xi, 
