Like many a latter-day political bigwig, Julius Caesar prepared for greater things to come by serving as a highway commissioner. His job was to take care of the Appian Way, the great road that stretched from Rome to Brindisi on Italy's southern coast. Laid out in 312 B.C. and already famed in Caesar's day, the Via Appia became known, in the centuries that followed, as the Queen of Roads. Many a victorious Roman legion marched homeward in triumph along its stone paving and over its skillfully engineered bridges. Wealthy Romans built their most sumptuous...
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