Epic Destruction of Appian Way - Rome's First Highway - Unstoppable Loss?

I left the dog at home for a few days and I've flown to Italy. All roads lead to Rome and this road, the Appian Way, is the queen of roads. There's shadows of history here. Every few feet there's a mystery. There's any street on the entire planet that could contain magical elements. Could be this one. Not the first road, but the first long road built specifically to transport troops. As the Romans expanded out over most of Italy, the Appian came to reach south, 400 miles away at the port of Brundisium on the east coast. To the person visiting this part of Rome today, it all looks generally old, collectively ancient, built and rebuilt over a long period of time. So the Appian Way was built 312 BC and you can see here how it was built at different times in different ways. This stuff in the middle, that's older than the smaller pavers on either side, they were put on later on as replacements. Now it's believed that the stone was taken from a volcano flow not too far away. Probably part of the reason why the road is where it is. It was fairly close to the materials. In the stones, the originals, you can actually see the grooves of where things like chariots and then carts would have been rolling across. Roads began at Rome, where there was the Master Itinerarium, a travel guide in the form of listings of cities, villages and other stops on the way. People looked upon it and said, all roads lead to Rome. So most of these things next to the Appian Way are facilities for the dead. Ways for rich people to try and live on, not literally, but in terms of reputation. Now one could ask themselves, how does this happen? How do these great monuments all fall apart? Well, go inside a graveyard and look at a grave anywhere in the world that's more than about 50 years old. It's very much falling apart. Another thing to note, having these things, these memories, physical memories next to the main road is pretty strange by modern standards. It'd be like having yourself buried with a big cross above you or something else on the M1 that goes from the airport downtown, wherever you live. This here is the Pyramidal Tomb. Obviously that's not what it was called when it was built. It would have been named after the person it was built in memory of. People now think that it was a noblewoman. It's probably true, but it's not definite. It was built around about 100 BC. The exact date, again, we don't know. The name Pyramidal really sort of describes the shape of it. It's sort of like this on the sides and it goes up like a triangle. It would have been more at the base when it was built. It's sort of shaped like a chess piece now, like this, but there also would have been nicer stone. This is just the core, the inside, the ugly bit. The facade was probably very expensive marble. There were probably statues on it or artwork, inscriptions, but they've been taken away by people centuries later. Now this could happen to any building on a long enough timeline. The Sydney Harbour Opera House could be dismantled and used for other things. The Chrysler Building. These things are built to last, but they only last so long. At this point in history, the Appian is no longer being built, although still used for normal things. It's mostly a kind of open-air museum. In July 2024, the Appian Way entered the UNESCO World Heritage List, which is why there is currently so much work going into preserving the precious left fragments. The Appian Way, or more correctly, Via Appia, was named after Appius Claudius Caiacus. He built the first aqueduct of Rome and the first major road, the Via Appia. Today, he's not thought of very much, even though the things that he built remain slightly familiar to millions. This here is the Tomb of Hilarus Fuscus. It was built around 30 BC, and then in the mid-1800s, it was sort of put back together again, and fallen down onto the ground. Refurbished from the bits that were still here, there were already a lot that was missing, but there used to be the names of the identities of the faces that are there. But in the 1980s, that section of it evaporated, disappeared, and has not been found since. This is a working road still. It's a ruin, but it still functions as a street. You've got cars going along, going that way, and that way as well. A type of technology that these rich and powerful people would have had no even potential to understand. Now, the fact that the names are gone, and the faces are gone, and the structure itself is gone, says something about legacy. Legacy is real, but you don't have a lot of control over it, and it runs out. It doesn't stay the same. If your legacy is like this the day that you die, it might get bigger, it might get smaller, but on a long enough timeline, it drops to zero, and then nobody knows anything about you anymore. So this broken monument here is a mystery to us. Historians do know quite a bit about it, but nobody knows enough about it. That's like the whole thing with ancient Rome, is that nobody knows enough about how everything worked. It's a mystery, and for the most part, it's a permanent mystery. But what would be more mysterious is everything around this monument that's falling down. All the scaffolding and the signage, that stuff, to the ancients, to Caesar, would be supernatural. Built for organized violence, it became the home of many burials. In 71 BC, a slave revolt led by ex-gladiator Spartacus was put down after two years of warfare. Having finally caught them all, the Romans judged that the prisoners of war had forfeited their right to live. 6,000 men were crucified along the road. So if you walk long enough the Appian Way, it gets pretty rural. You've got some cows here. Behind the cows eating grass is a monument, and it's covered in plants. So even now, there's only so much you can see because nature's taken over. As the Roman Empire declined, the road, and even more so the monuments beside the path, fell into poor conditions. Materials were plundered by new people to build new things for themselves. Much of what was here has so long already disappeared that there are in places zero clues that anything had ever been. The largest mausoleum on the Appian Way, Castler Rotondo. Someone built a farmhouse with a view upon it. Architectural elements placed into a brick wall, contrary to earlier beliefs, they do not seem to go together. Even in the past, people were trying to reconstruct things lost to history. During the Renaissance, as people evolved out of the Middle Ages and into more modern times, an interest in the ruins of Rome increased. Artists and scholars came to see themselves as the cultural heirs to the ancient Romans. Today, the main draw to the place is from tourists who fill the pool of things weathered and pretty. Torre Selci, a 12th century tower built on top of a much older mausoleum. Even that newer thing has now mostly gone. The ancient Romans are gone now, and the people between then and now are gone too. Everything of all humankind may inevitably become a permanent mystery.