Via Appia - strada di imperatori, soldati e pellegrini

Guide to the route and itineraries It is an open-air museum, with villas, theatres, basilicas, aqueducts and funerary monuments from every era, representing the ancient and the modern, united by a single element: the road. Traveling along a road like the Via Appia is equivalent to feeling the weight of Antiquity, which has never been light in Italy and especially in the South, where for years a human and scientific reason has been sought for what characterized it. In this bipolar itinerary, in which monuments and local realities are always present, a third extremely suggestive element also prevails which is specific to archaeology, that is, the inseparable link between topography and ancient places to be explored and valorised. The contextuality between these different physical operations is made up of logical processes and practical reconstructions which in archeology are rarely used and often lose their meaning. In fact, the Appia, as celebrated as it is unrecognised, from Rome to Brindisi seems to lose almost all its traces immediately after crossing the borders of Lazio, hiding in the inextricable meanders of this or that hypothesis.