Via Salaria

Listen for a moment. Scooters buzz past, a bus sighs at the stop, and somewhere a café grinder rattles. It sounds like any busy Roman street. Yet the line of asphalt under your feet follows one of the oldest routes in Italy. Long before Rome had emperors, marble or aqueducts, people walked this way carrying something they could not live without. That something was salt.

The name gives the story away. Via Salaria means, quite simply, the Salt Road. In Latin, sal is salt, and the word survives in our own word salary. Near the mouth of the river Tiber, on the coast west of the city, there were salt flats. Inland, in the hills to the northeast, lived the Sabines, an Italic people who needed that salt for their herds, their cheese and their cured meat.

So the road came before the city, or at least grew up alongside it. Historians generally agree that this was a trade track in use long before the Romans paved it. Salt moved upriver, then inland along this route into the Apennine hills. Rome sat at a convenient crossing of the Tiber. In a sense, the city grew rich partly by standing in the middle of the salt trade.

Over the centuries the Romans turned the track into a proper road. It ran northeast out of the city, past the Sabine town of Reate, which is modern Rieti. From there it climbed through the mountains and eventually reached the Adriatic coast on the far side of Italy. Think about that for a second. This single road connected one sea to the other, crossing the spine of the peninsula.

In the city itself, the road left through a gate in the walls. In earlier times that was the Porta Collina, in the old republican wall. Later, when the emperor Aurelian built the great brick walls in the third century, a new gate carried the road's name: the Porta Salaria. You will not find that gate today. It was damaged in the fighting of 1870, when Italian troops took Rome, and it was later removed to make way for traffic.

Here is the first surprise. In the year 410, the Visigoths, a Germanic people led by Alaric, entered Rome through the Porta Salaria. It was the first time in about eight hundred years that a foreign army had sacked the city. The shock travelled across the whole Roman world. So this ordinary-looking stretch, near today's Piazza Fiume, marks the place where one of history's great turning points came through the door.

The second surprise is smaller, and more human. When workers cleared the old gate in the late nineteenth century, they found a tomb built into the wall. It belonged to a boy named Quintus Sulpicius Maximus. He was about eleven years old. He had competed in a poetry contest in Rome and composed verses in Greek. His family carved his poem onto his memorial. A copy now stands near the spot, so look for it close to Piazza Fiume.

That discovery reminds us of a Roman habit. The dead were buried outside the city walls, and they were buried along the roads. Travellers leaving Rome passed long rows of tombs, each one trying to catch the eye and keep a name alive. Via Salaria was no different. Further out, under the green of the modern city, early Christians dug burial galleries into the soft volcanic rock.

The best known of these are the Catacombs of Priscilla, on the stretch of road beyond the old walls. These underground passages run for long distances through the tufa, a light, porous volcanic stone. On the walls you can still see early Christian paintings. Visits go with a guide, deep in the cool and quiet, a strange contrast to the traffic above. If you have time, it is worth booking ahead.

The road also runs past great green spaces. On one side sits Villa Ada, a large park with tall umbrella pines, lawns and a small lake. Romans come here to run, walk their dogs and escape the heat. Closer to the centre stands Villa Albani, an eighteenth-century villa built to hold a cardinal's collection of ancient sculpture. It is private, so you will usually see only its walls and gates from the street.

Further north, the road crosses the river Aniene on the Ponte Salario. A bridge has stood at this crossing since ancient times, though it has been rebuilt more than once. Roman tradition places a famous duel here. According to the old story, a young Roman fought a giant Gaul on the bridge, won, and took the warrior's golden neck chain. Whether every detail is true, nobody can say. But Romans told the tale for centuries.

Today, most of Via Salaria is a modern road. In the city it is a long, straight avenue lined with apartment blocks from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, shops, schools and embassies. Beyond Rome, it becomes a state highway that still heads toward Rieti and the mountains. Drivers going to the Adriatic coast still follow, more or less, the line the salt traders took. Few of them know it.

So take a last look around. Notice how straight the street runs, and how the traffic flows northeast, out toward the hills. Feel the slight rise and fall of the ground beneath you. Under the asphalt, under the tram lines and the cables, lie layers of older roads. As you walk on, remember the plain grey crystals that started it all... and the long line of people who carried them here.