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This part is clearly nonsense:
> According to the planner’s calculation, the journey would have taken 43 days to cover 1,500 Roman miles. To put that into a contemporary context: the same route by road today can be completed in 14 days (340 hours) on foot, or 16 hours by car (source in Spanish).
It would take 340 hours to walk, whether you do it today or in Roman times. Google maps is assuming you would walk for 24 hours a day, the planner is assuming you could walk for around 8.
That said, as someone who has walked on cobblestone - a modern road in modern boots is different to an ancient road in ancient boots.
I'd bet money the 'real' travel times would differ.
In the case of Spain, many long distance roads are no longer safe for pedestrians as there are cars on them now. Madrid to Milan would be a suicide missions in current day.
Are there no bike paths or foot paths close by? You don’t literally have to walk on the street the cars are using.
This is a Street View link to Via Augusta, one of the oldest roads between Spain and Italy (8 to 2 BC). It’s not walkable anymore. There isn’t an alternative footpath. You might hike on the beach and climb the rocks in between but that is significantly harder than cobblestones.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/ACFQnM14CQgXGBBu8
Coordinates (41.1337583, 1.3308702)
If I enter Madrid and Milan in Google Maps and select walking, it does show some footpaths to take, no? Those don’t look like major roads.
Don’t know how to share the route without doxxing myself but you can enter it yourself.
The pattern of dirt and rocks on the other side of one of the guardrails looks like what you get from people walking it.
> an ancient road in ancient boots
Boots? That's luxury! Sandals more likely...
What you call sandals the Romans called boots. Their boots were open on the top but still heavily soled. This suited their climate and kept the foot cool and dry.
The wikipedia article names them in the first paragraph "sandal-boots".
So maybe they were both
(If I were to see someone wear them today, I would call them sandals)
A modern alternative might be a pair of crocs?
These were hob nailed thick soles leather boots where the uppers were a series of adjustable straps. I don't think there's anything modern that's comparable.
The closest in terms of function would probably be the jungle boot, where the uppers have drains and fabric air circulation panels built in to keep the foot cooler and dryer.
These boots were designed to allow the wearer to walk long distances without discomfort in the Mediterranean climate of the Roman empire
Yes, distance is about the same. 1488Km in Google and 1075 Roman miles in Omnesviae [0], that is ~1590 Km.
I think they generally take some approximations, but yeah the walking one is problematic. Horseback is also mentioned, but depending on wealth you could use regular stops across the road and swap your horse when it got tired. So travel times would depend not only on your horse but also your ability to swap horses and availability of stops along the way.
Which in my mind is reminiscent of swapping your EV battery along roadstops lol.
Either way, these are just approximations to give a general sense of travel speed. And no doubt nowadays the world feels smaller because we can much more easily travel between distant locations.
Who'd walk the route more easily for 8h though? A random Western today or a random Roman then?
Roman legions marched around 30 km/day [0], carrying their own supplies, food, weapons and armour, needing to spend time making and breaking camp each day.
Modern European pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago seem to do about 20 km/day [1] and it's considered tiring but accessible by average people, not serious hikers. They carry less of their supplies and do not need to fortify their camp against barbarians.
Roman soldiers were presumably fitter and better trained than the average Roman (though maybe not by much, since everyone worked manual jobs). Maybe that's enough to account for the difference.
[0] https://www.quora.com/Did-Roman-legions-actually-march-20-mi...
[1] https://caminoways.com/how-many-days-does-it-take-to-walk-th...
> Modern European pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago seem to do about 20 km/day [1] and it's considered tiring but accessible by average people, not serious hikers.
Yeah, because they sit in the Albergue half of the day. You need to start looking for one around 4pm or it will be full because people tend to stop walking around that time. It’s also an activity that mainly retired people do.
You can easily do 40 km/day on the Camino routes with manageable elevation (the coastal ones).
You’re right about the equipment weight though, I can’t imagine what a Roman soldiers full pack must have weighed with the textiles of the time. On the Camino, you don’t really need to bring anything except some clothes.
I see the point with the camp but on the other hand after the third day you’re more limited by your feet, not the time, so you would still have enough time for that in my estimation.
i’ve walked the via francigena and the italian section has quite a few sections of ancient roman road. they’re admittedly not contiguous, and are worn more extensively now, so i don’t get the same overall experience of treading on the stones for kilometers as they would have.
i target 35km/day with a 40L pack and finish my segments within 6-7 hours. asphalt, dirt and grass, and hiking trails (rocks, roots, dirt, etc) are the most standard surfaces and, to be honest, they’re all exhausting in their own rights so a change in surface is always welcome.
i can’t imagine marching most of this with near double body weight and then having to make camp.
That's how they conquered all of their known world though, out of sheer bloody-mindedness.
I'd like to add they were also doing all that wearing leather sandals.
Imagine the Roman army with Adidas Ultraboost.
> Imagine the Roman army with Adidas Ultraboost
It wouldn't have been any. After 3 days, the Adidas Ultraboost would have been "kaput"
And without coffee! So you can't get a quick 'pick me up' along the way.
> A random Western today or a random Roman then?
Probably better to compare "A random Italian" rather than "A random Westerner", the Americans and other car-focused cultures kind of drag down the average a bit too much otherwise.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c33y3151vydo - "Pizza, pasta, potatoes, protein - how Italian children became so overweight"
Industry fucked us too, dude.
Hmm, thats a sad read. But I am not buying 'its the industry' in 2026, this is caused by folks who should and could do better but couldn't be bothered. Its also indicated in the article, young people know its junkfood and know long term effects but simply don't care. If wanting to point fingers aim them at society as a whole, junkfood was well recognized problem 10-15 years ago when these kids were being born.
Mine was a quip, but if we want to go deeper: like any phenomenon, it's obviously a combination of cultural, economic, and social factors; but it's hard not to take the marxist view that it's all about the economy when we get bombarded every second by advertising for food, the composition of which is largely dictated by considerations about profit margins. Even pasta is not produced in the same way as 80 years ago, not even from the same ingredients (half the wheat used in Italian pasta now comes from Canada and other places).
ehhh Italy is sadly one of the most car-dependent countries in the western world, topping the number of vehicles per 1000 people in Europe (excluding microstates). No one's safe
I wanted to walk from one town to another. 15 kilometers. It was on a road where cars would go past literally 15 centimeters from you. No shoulder and because of the guardrails no ditch to walk in either. I didn’t do it, took the bus.
Probably a random Roman. People used to walk a lot, often barefoot. The random modern Westerner would get blisters within the first week.
When I was in my late teens, I used to hike with a 15 kg backpack (with the technology of the late 80s). I could walk about 15 km in average hills over 8-10 hours.
I was average, physical capacities wise.
Probably the Westerner with better shoes, clothes, energy bars, hydration drinks, sunscreen etc.
The only caveat since you said "random" is obesity.
Eh, I'd say it's equal.
I've walked for 8 hrs before, wearing modern sneakers on roads with vehicular traffic, and travelled about the same distance estimated by Google Maps. I'd estimate the Roman would like be able to travel in the same duration, barring other extenuating factors (like Caesar staging a revolt against the Senate and crossing with his legion right in front of your planned route), with worse shoes but more walk-friendly roads.
Cobblestones aren't walk friendly.
Asphalt/concrete isn't either. Gravel or packed dirt is way better.
That said 30km/day is very real, even in mountain country. It takes 6-7 hours, the rest is resting/gawking/laying on a mountain watching the sky (or trying furiosly to find that effin trail on osmand). I walked that a few times a week when I lived in Montenegro, and that was 50/50 roads and mountain trails from sea level up to 700m-ish elevation and back. No fancy shoes, no prep but for a hat and couple bottles of water. After a third walk or so it isn't even exhausting.
Sure, but I'd imagine the average human could walk substantially further on flat modern roads in modern footwear than on cobblestone with ancient sandles.
You use 10–20% more energy for just mildly uneven surfaces - probably more for roman cobblestone.
Not if cutting through dense bush, water, bog or rocky environments would be necessary.
I don’t think the Roman street system way covered in dense bush, that was kind of the point
Definitely. Oldest bridges in France are from the Roman era.
It would take longer now because we have to wait at crosswalks and ask for a code to go to the bathroom
> The tool is called OmnesViae (Omnesviae.org (source in Spanish))
I’m pretty sure the page is in Latin for me
Not including having to wait three months in the winter before attempting to cross the alps.
The distances are sound, but the estimated times to get from point A to point B are a little bit sketchy.
This year I walked from Utrecht to Compostela in 45 days. That was around 12 hours on the street each day, with the comfiest shoes humanity has ever made and a super market every 15 km at most.
Even then, it was tough af
Tabla Peutingeriana at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_Peutingeriana
A map graved in stone in Rome wasn't too convenient for travelling...
Open source code on Codeberg and historical data combined into a functional map—this is the kind of passion project the web was built for.
I mean, technically it was built for "the management of general information about accelerators and experiments at CERN". The fact that it also supports a whole bunch of peoples' passion projects as well as a multi-trillion dollar commercial marketplace is just a bonus...
Fair point! Though I suspect Tim Berners-Lee wouldn't mind a 43-day Roman road trip planner being part of CERN's ultimate legacy.