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  • Published: 13 June 2024
  • ISBN: 9781529935844
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Narrator: Catherine Fletcher
  • RRP: $36.99
Categories:

The Roads To Rome

A History





Brimming with life and drama, this is the first book to explore two thousand years of European history through one of the most important imperial networks ever built

'All roads lead to Rome.' It's a medieval proverb, but it's also true: today's European roads still follow the networks of the ancient empire and continue to grip our modern imaginations as a physical manifestation of Rome’s ‘extraordinary greatness’.

Over the two thousand years since they were first built, the roads have been walked by crusaders and pilgrims, liberators and dictators, but also by tourists and writers, refugees and artists. As channels of trade and travel, and routes for conquest and creativity, Catherine Fletcher shows how the roads forever transformed the cultures, and intertwined the fates, of a vast panoply of people across Europe and beyond.

The Roads to Rome is a magnificent journey into a past that remains intimately connected to our present. Travelling from Scotland to Cádiz to Istanbul and back to Rome, we meander and march through a series of nations and empires that have risen and fallen. Along the way, we encounter spies and bandits, scheming innkeepers, a Byzantine noblewoman on the run, young aristocrats on their Grand Tour, a conquering Napoleon, Keats and the Shelleys, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and even Mussolini on his motorbike.

Reflecting on his own walk on the Appian Way, Charles Dickens observed that here is ‘a history in every stone that strews the ground.’ Based on outstanding original research, and brimming with life and drama, this is the first book to explore two thousand years of history through one the greatest imperial networks ever built.

  • Published: 13 June 2024
  • ISBN: 9781529935844
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Narrator: Catherine Fletcher
  • RRP: $36.99
Categories:

About the author

Catherine Fletcher

Catherine Fletcher is a historian of Renaissance and early modern Europe. Her previous books include The Black Prince of Florence: The Spectacular Life and Treacherous World of Alessandro de' Medici and The Divorce of Henry VIII: The Untold Story. Catherine is Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University and broadcasts regularly for the BBC.

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