Ancient Roman Appian Way becomes Italy’s 60th Unesco world heritage site

Rome: Italy’s Via Appia Antica, or Appian Way, the earliest and most important road built by the ancient Romans, has been named a Unesco world heritage site, making Italy the country with the world’s highest number of locations on the coveted list.

Known as the Regina Viarum, or Queen of Roads, it connected Rome with the port of Brindisi in the south and marked a revolution in the construction of roads.

The first section of highway was built in 312BC by the Roman statesman Appius Claudius Caecus and served as a strategic corridor for military purposes. Until then, the only roads outside ancient Rome were Etruscan and went towards Etruria, which was a region of central Italy.

Today, the first 17km (10 miles) of the cobblestone path remains and is preserved within the Appia Antica archaeological park in the south of Rome. Popular with history buffs, walkers and cyclists, the perfectly intact road is flanked by what remains of ancient Roman aqueducts and villas. Beneath the path is a sprawling network of catacombs where Christian converts were buried.

The bid for the path to be added to the Unesco heritage list was made by Italy’s culture ministry and declared at a session of the World Heritage Committee in Delhi.

“It was originally conceived as a strategic road for military conquest, advancing towards the East and Asia Minor,” Unesco said. “The Via Appia later enabled the cities it connected to grow and new settlements emerged, facilitating agricultural production and trade.”

Unesco said the road illustrated “the advanced technical skill of Roman engineers in the construction of roads, civil-engineering projects, infrastructure and sweeping land-reclamation works, as well as a vast series of monumental structures including, for example, triumphal arches, baths, amphitheatres and basilicas, aqueducts, canals, bridges, and public fountains”.

Via Appia is the 60th cultural heritage site in Italy to be added to the list, which includes the historic centres of Rome, Florence, Venice, Pisa and Naples, as well as the five villages of the Cinque Terre and the cave city of Matera in Basilicata.

The culture minister, Gennaro Sangiuliano, said the inclusion “is a recognition of the value of our history and our identity”, while Roberto Gualtieri, the mayor of Rome, described the path as “the symbol of an entire civilisation”.

Unesco also added a series of outdoor sculptures by the Romanian modernist master Constantin Brâncuși to the world heritage list, celebrating their place as one of the most notable examples of 20th-century public art.

Brâncuși, who was born in the small village of Hobița, near the Carpathian mountains, but lived in Paris for most of his life, created the open-air collection that includes the Endless Column and the Gate of the Kiss in the small south-western Romanian town of Târgu Jiu in 1937-1938 as a tribute to fallen first world war soldiers.

The five sculptural installations aligned on a 1.5km-long axis along Târgu Jiu’s central Avenue of Heroes are one of the few Brâncuși works located in Romania.

“The granted recognition forces us to protect the monumental ensemble, to keep it intact for future generations and for humanity’s cultural memory,” Raluca Turcan, Romania’s culture minister, said.