Itiner-e is a free, open digital atlas of the roads of the Roman Empire, made by a research team including Brughmans, Pažout, de Soto and Bjerregaard Vahlstrup. Its dataset maps roads as they stood around AD 150 and is the source of every road line on this site.
Key takeaways
- Itiner-e covers the Roman Empire at its greatest extent, around AD 150, and includes any route with an evidenced, conjectured or hypothesised location.
- This map uses version 2024 1.3, which holds 299,171 km of road in 14,769 segments across 39 countries.
- The roads were identified from archaeological and historical sources, then located by digitising maps and checking against satellite imagery and terrain.
- The data is free to reuse under a CC BY 4.0 licence with credit to the authors.
What Itiner-e is
Itiner-e is a digital atlas of Roman roads. It combines a downloadable dataset, published in a data paper in Scientific Data in 2025 [1], with a live website where each road segment has its own address [2]. The authors describe it as the most detailed and comprehensive open dataset of roads in the whole Roman Empire [1].
The atlas covers the empire at its maximum extent, around AD 150. It includes any land route with an evidenced, conjectured or hypothesised location in the sources used, which means it also includes older roads that the Romans kept using [1]. The dataset is fixed as a numbered release so other people can cite exactly what they used: this site uses version 2024 1.3, archived on Zenodo [3].
How the atlas was made
The process had two steps [1]. First, the team identified roads from archaeological excavations and surveys, milestones, and historical sources such as the Antonine Itinerary and the Tabula Peutingeriana, plus regional studies. Gazetteers of ancient places, including Pleiades, helped fix the sites at each end. Then they located each road by digitising it from existing maps and studies, correcting it against satellite imagery and the shape of the land. In Britain the main basis was the work of Ivan Margary, plus some roads in the south-east Midlands from another study.
Every segment records its sources, so you can trace a line back to the evidence behind it. Each also carries a certainty class and a type. Those are explained in road certainty and main roads versus secondary roads.
This site draws its lines, lengths and counts from the dataset and adds nothing to the road geometry. The Roman place names come separately from the Pleiades gazetteer, and the basemap is OpenStreetMap. The full credits are on the data sources page and in where the data comes from.
An example from our data
In version 2024 1.3 the dataset holds 14,769 segments with a total length of 299,171 km in 39 countries. Of that, 2.7% is classed certain, 89.8% conjectured and 7.4% hypothetical.
The UK part is a good test of how the atlas works. The United Kingdom page shows 11,574 km of road across 1,367 segments, nearly all of it conjectured. That reflects the method: the British network was digitised mainly from Margary's recorded observations, so it is as precise as that source and the later joining-up allow [1].
The thing people get wrong
Itiner-e is a model of what is known, not a survey of what exists. The authors point out that long stretches of Roman road have only rarely been excavated or survived to the present day [1]. So a line on the map is evidence-based, but it is a reconstruction. It also shows the network around AD 150 only: roads built later, and Roman roads that vanished before, are not there.
Frequently asked questions
Who made Itiner-e?
A team of researchers whose 2025 paper in Scientific Data is led by Brughmans, with Pažout, de Soto and Bjerregaard Vahlstrup among the authors.
Can I reuse the Itiner-e data?
Yes. It is published under a CC BY 4.0 licence, so you must credit the authors. This site's data licences page lists the full attribution.
Which version does this map use?
Version 2024 1.3, the pinned release on Zenodo.
Sources
- Itiner-e: A high-resolution dataset of roads of the Roman Empire, Scientific Data (Brughmans et al., 2025).
- Itiner-e: the digital atlas of ancient roads, Itiner-e.
- Itiner-e dataset (version 2024 1.3), Zenodo.
- Every figure from our own map is worked out from the datasets on the data sources page (checked against Itiner-e version 2024 1.3).