Queen of Roads: Rome's Appian Way from the Baths of Caracalla to the Catacombs

Out through the Aurelian Walls onto the Via Appia Antica: the Scipios' tomb, Peter's footprints at Quo Vadis, the Crypt of the Popes, an emperor's racetrack and the tower of Caecilia Metella

Rome · 11 stops · 27 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Baths of Caracalla: A Palace for the People

   Viale delle Terme di Caracalla 52, 00153 Roma RM, Italy

   Stand on the grass and let your eyes climb the brick walls in front of you, broken ridges more than thirty metres high, with sky showing through where great vaults once closed overhead. In summer, swifts scream around the ruins. Nobody has bathed here for almost fifteen hundred years, and yet the place still feels as if it is waiting for the doors to open.

   These are the Baths of Caracalla, opened around 216 AD. Picture marble on every wall, mosaics of athletes underfoot, a cold pool open to the sky, warm rooms, and a round hot hall crowned by a dome some thirty-five metres across. Perhaps sixteen hundred bathers at a time came for a tiny fee or for nothing at all. It was a gym, a spa, a library and a park in one: a palace an emperor gave to ordinary Romans.

   And the emperor? Caracalla was not a nice man. In 211 he had his own brother Geta murdered, the story goes in the arms of their mother, and then ordered Geta's name and face chiselled off monuments across the empire. A year later he granted Roman citizenship to almost every free man in the empire... cynics, then and now, point out that new citizens also paid new taxes. Bread, baths and blood: that was his politics.

   The real marvel is underground. Beneath your feet runs a network of service tunnels wide enough for carts, where slaves stoked the furnaces day and night and an aqueduct branch delivered the water. Down there, archaeologists also found the largest shrine of Mithras in Rome, a cave-like temple to the bull-slaying god. The baths worked until 537, when the Goths besieging the city cut the aqueducts. In the sixteenth century the Farnese family dug colossal statues out of the rubble, among them the Farnese Hercules, now in Naples.

   Since 1937 the ruins have enjoyed a second life as an open-air opera stage on summer nights, and in 1990 the Three Tenors sang here to the whole world. Now walk east along the avenue under the umbrella pines to the small church facing the baths, where the first Christian legend of this road is waiting.

2. 2. Santi Nereo e Achilleo: The Church of the Lost Bandage

   Viale delle Terme di Caracalla 28, 00153 Roma RM, Italy

   Cross to the quiet side of the avenue and find the plain front of a small church set back behind its trees, easy to miss on the way to somewhere grander. Most people do miss it. Its doors are often closed, which only adds to the feeling that it is keeping something to itself.

   It is. In late antiquity this place was known as the titulus Fasciolae, the church of the little bandage. The story goes that Saint Peter, escaping from prison during Nero's persecution, hurried down this road towards the Appian Way, and the bandage wrapped around his leg, rubbed raw by chains, slipped off and fell right here. The faithful marked the spot. Hold on to that legend, because Peter has an appointment a little further down the road.

   The church is dedicated to Nereus and Achilleus, two soldiers who, according to tradition, threw down their weapons when they became Christians and died as martyrs. They were buried in a catacomb on the Via Ardeatina, south of the city. In the centuries that followed, as the countryside emptied and grew dangerous, the relics of many martyrs were carried from those cemeteries into churches inside the walls.

   Pope Leo the Third rebuilt the church around the year 800, and the mosaic on the arch above the altar survives from his time, with the Transfiguration of Christ between Moses and Elijah, flanked by the Annunciation. Then, in the 1590s, the great Church historian Cardinal Cesare Baronius, whose titular church this was, restored it for the Jubilee of 1600 and filled the walls with frescoes of martyrdoms, painted to make pilgrims flinch.

   Baronius loved this place so much that he left a Latin inscription addressed to whoever would be its cardinal after him, begging his successor to take nothing away, reduce nothing and change nothing. A four-hundred-year-old plea for conservation. Now walk on to the little square just beyond, and take the narrow road on the right between high garden walls, Via di Porta San Sebastiano. This is where the Appian Way truly begins.

3. 3. Tomb of the Scipios: Rome's First Family Vault

   Via di Porta San Sebastiano 9, 00179 Roma RM, Italy

   Walk along the narrow lane between high walls and you could be in the countryside: ivy, cypresses, garden gates, hardly a car. Behind the gate on the left, in a small park, a dark doorway opens into the hillside. This lane was the first stretch of the Appian Way, and that doorway leads into the tomb of the most famous family of the Roman Republic.

   The Scipios began burying their dead here in the early third century BC. The oldest coffin belonged to Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus, consul in 298 BC, Barbatus meaning the bearded one. His sarcophagus carries a short poem in archaic Latin praising a man whose good looks matched his courage, one of the oldest Latin inscriptions of its kind. The original now sits in the Vatican Museums. What waits in the gloom below is a faithful copy, standing where the old general lay for two thousand years.

   Here is the twist. The greatest Scipio of all, Africanus, who defeated Hannibal at Zama in 202 BC, is not here. Attacked in the Senate by his political enemies, he withdrew in disgust to his villa at Liternum on the coast, and the historian Livy says he was buried there. Legend even claims his tomb told Rome, ungrateful fatherland, you shall not have my bones. Yet the same Livy reports that three statues stood at the entrance of this vault: two Scipios, and between them the poet Ennius, who had sung their wars.

   Then the tomb was forgotten. It turned up in 1614, and was properly opened only in 1780 by the owners of the vineyard above, who promptly carried off the inscriptions to sell. In the third century AD, a family even built a house right on top of the vault, as if the Scipios were nothing more than old foundations. Nearby in the same park are smaller tombs called columbaria, dovecotes, their walls honeycombed with niches for the urns of freedmen and servants.

   Keep going along the lane. Notice how the walls seem to close in on either side... in a few minutes the great gate of the city rises in front of you, with a lonely arch standing guard just before it.

4. 4. Porta San Sebastiano and the Arch of Drusus

   Via di Porta San Sebastiano 18, 00179 Roma RM, Italy

   Stop in front of the lonely arch that spans the road, then look past it to the colossal gate beyond: two towers of white stone and brick, as tall as an apartment block, framing a single passage. This is the largest and best-preserved gate in the Aurelian Walls. For most of the last two thousand years, Rome simply ended here.

   The arch first. Everyone calls it the Arch of Drusus, after the brother of the emperor Tiberius. It almost certainly has nothing to do with him. Most scholars think that, at least in the form you see, it was part of the aqueduct branch that carried water over the Appian Way to the Baths of Caracalla, where you started. The marble dressing made it look triumphal. The water made it useful.

   The walls were built in a hurry. In 271 AD, with barbarian raiders striking deep into Italy, the emperor Aurelian ordered Rome, which had felt no need for walls for centuries, to be enclosed again, in about nineteen kilometres of brick. This gate was then called the Porta Appia. Around the year 400 the emperor Honorius strengthened and heightened the defences, and much of what you see is his. Only in the Middle Ages did it take the name of the martyr whose basilica waits further down the road, Sebastian.

   Walk under the archway and look closely at the marble jamb of the inner gate. Scratched into the stone is the Archangel Michael spearing a dragon, with a Latin inscription beside him. It celebrates a battle fought on 29 September 1327, Michael's feast day, when Roman militiamen drove off troops sent by King Robert of Naples. Medieval graffiti, signed by the city itself.

   In 1536 the emperor Charles the Fifth rode in through this gate in a triumphal procession after his victory at Tunis, and a whole route through the ruins was cleared for him. Today the towers hold the Museum of the Walls, and you can walk along a stretch of the battlements. Now step through the gate and out of ancient Rome. From here on, the old road under your feet is the Via Appia Antica itself.

5. 5. The Almo River and the Old Paper Mill

   Via Appia Antica 42, 00179 Roma RM, Italy

   Follow the road downhill under the railway bridge and feel the ground dip into a shallow valley. Behind a gate, red-roofed industrial buildings sit among the trees beside a stream you can barely see. You have reached the Almo, the little river that crosses the Appian Way here, and the old paper mill that is now the headquarters of the Appia Antica park.

   Time to meet the road properly. The Appian Way was begun in 312 BC by the censor Appius Claudius, later nicknamed Caecus, the Blind. It was the first great Roman highway, laid to move legions south to Capua, and it was later pushed all the way to Brindisi on the heel of Italy. The poet Statius called it the regina viarum, the Queen of Roads. Its miles were counted from the Porta Capena near the Circus Maximus, and the column that marked the first mile now stands on the balustrade of the Capitol.

   The Almo was sacred. Every year at the end of March, the priests of Cybele, the Great Mother goddess brought to Rome from Asia Minor in 204 BC, carried her image and her sacred black stone down to this stream, near where it meets the Tiber, and bathed them in its waters. Drums, cymbals, ecstatic dancing, priests in long eastern robes... Romans came out to stare. A very respectable road, and on its edge, an oriental mystery festival.

   Much later the stream turned mill wheels, and this mill ended up making paper. Then came the post-war building boom, when villas, walls and private gates began to swallow the ancient road. In 1953 the journalist Antonio Cederna published a furious article called The Gangsters of the Appia, and spent the rest of his life fighting for this landscape. The regional park was finally created in 1988, and the old mill became its home.

   So every step you take from here is on protected ground. Walk on along the road. A couple of minutes ahead, where the Appia splits in two, a tiny church stands right at the fork. It is where the most haunting legend of this road takes place.

6. 6. Domine Quo Vadis: Footprints at the Fork

   Via Appia Antica 51, 00179 Roma RM, Italy

   Stand at the fork where the Via Ardeatina peels away from the Appia and look at the little church squeezed between the two roads, its pale front carrying a Latin inscription. Step inside if the door is open, and in the floor you'll find a slab of marble with two footprints pressed into it, side by side, as if someone had stopped right here and simply stood still.

   The legend is told in an apocryphal text of the second century, the Acts of Peter. Nero's persecution has begun, and Peter's friends beg him to save himself. He slips out of the city by night along this road, and at this very spot he meets Christ walking the other way, towards Rome. Domine, quo vadis? Lord, where are you going? And Christ answers: to Rome, to be crucified again. Peter understands. He turns around, walks back into the city, and is crucified, head down, at his own request.

   And the footprints? The faithful believed Christ left them in the stone. Archaeologists suggest something stranger: a Roman ex-voto, a thank-offering left at a roadside shrine by a traveller, carved feet meaning I made the journey safely. The original slab is kept in the Basilica of San Sebastiano further down the road, and what you see here is a copy. The church itself, officially Santa Maria in Palmis, received its present front in 1637.

   In 1896 the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz turned the legend into a novel, Quo Vadis, an epic of Nero's Rome and the first Christians. It became a worldwide bestseller, helped win him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905, and was filmed again and again, most famously by Hollywood in 1951. Inside the church, a bust of Sienkiewicz placed by his compatriots keeps watch over the footprints.

   Think back to the bandage by the Baths of Caracalla: the same flight, the same night, the same road, and here the moment he turned around. Now take the left-hand branch, staying on the Via Appia Antica, and follow it gently uphill between walls and cypresses until a gate on the right opens onto a long avenue of trees.

7. 7. San Callisto: The Slave Who Became Pope

   Via Appia Antica 110, 00179 Roma RM, Italy

   Turn in through the gate and start up the long avenue of cypresses, with olive groves and open fields on either side. It feels like a country estate, and in a sense it is one... laid over the top of a vast underground city of the dead.

   The estate bears the name of a man with one of the most colourful careers in early Church history. Our main source is his bitter enemy, the theologian Hippolytus, so take what follows with a pinch of salt. Callixtus, he says, was a slave who ran a bank for his Christian master, lost the depositors' money, tried to escape by ship, threw himself into the sea when he was caught, and was later sent to the mines of Sardinia after causing a disturbance in a synagogue.

   And yet. Freed from the mines, Callixtus came back to Rome, and around the year 200 Pope Zephyrinus put him in charge of the Christian cemetery here on the Appian Way. He ran it so well that in 217 he was elected bishop of Rome himself. Hippolytus never forgave him and set himself up as a rival bishop, often called the first antipope. The ironic ending: Callixtus is not buried in the catacomb that bears his name. He lies in another cemetery, on the Via Aurelia, on the far side of the city.

   Under the fields around you run galleries estimated at about twenty kilometres, on as many as four levels, with hundreds of thousands of burials. Forget the films: Christians did not hide or live down there. These were legal cemeteries, dug into soft volcanic tuff outside the walls, because Roman law forbade burial inside the city. Poor families paid for a simple shelf cut into the rock, sealed with tiles, a name painted or scratched beside a fish, an anchor or a dove.

   Those little symbols were a quiet code of hope in a world that buried its dead without much of it. Keep walking up the avenue through the trees to the cluster of low buildings and a small brick chapel with three rounded apses. Close beneath it lies the most sacred room in the catacomb.

8. 8. The Crypt of the Popes and Saint Cecilia

   Via Appia Antica 110/126, 00179 Roma RM, Italy

   Stop beside the little brick building with three rounded apses, shaped like a clover leaf, standing alone among the trees. It is one of the few early Christian structures above ground here, a small memorial church from late antiquity. Beneath your feet, a staircase leads down into the heart of the catacomb.

   Down there is the Crypt of the Popes. In the third century, nine bishops of Rome were laid to rest in a single chamber, and some of their names, cut in Greek on the slabs, can still be read: Anterus, Fabian, Lucius, Eutychian. In 258, during the persecution of the emperor Valerian, Pope Sixtus the Second was seized in one of the cemeteries along this road while leading a service, and beheaded together with several of his deacons. He was buried here, among his predecessors.

   Next door is the crypt of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music. Her body rested here until the ninth century, when Pope Paschal the First moved it to her church in Trastevere. When her tomb there was opened in 1599, the story goes, the body was found intact, lying on its side, and the sculptor Stefano Maderno carved her exactly as she had been seen. A copy of his statue now lies in her empty niche down here, the neck still showing the marks of the executioner's blade.

   When the barbarian invasions came, the relics were moved inside the city, and the catacombs were slowly abandoned and forgotten. This one was rediscovered in the middle of the nineteenth century by Giovanni Battista de Rossi, the founding father of Christian archaeology, who spotted a broken inscription in a vineyard and followed it underground. The story goes that when he showed the Crypt of the Popes to Pius the Ninth, the pope was moved to tears.

   Back on the Appian Way, turn right and keep walking south. In a few minutes the road opens onto a small square in front of a pale basilica... the place that gave the whole world the word catacomb.

9. 9. San Sebastiano: Where the Word Catacomb Was Born

   Via Appia Antica 136, 00179 Roma RM, Italy

   Come out onto the little square and face the basilica: a calm seventeenth-century portico on paired columns, pale against the pines. It looks almost modest for one of the seven great pilgrim churches of Rome. The secret, as always on this road, is what lies underneath.

   In ancient times the road here ran past a hollow in the ground, where stone had once been quarried. The place was known as ad catacumbas, by the hollows. Christians began burying their dead in galleries dug beneath it, and for centuries the name belonged to this one cemetery alone. Only much later, when the others were rediscovered, did catacomb become the word for every underground burial ground in the world.

   Below the church, archaeologists found a small third-century courtyard with a bench, where people gathered for funeral meals. Its plaster is covered with graffiti scratched by visitors, prayers in rough Latin and Greek to the apostles Peter and Paul, such as a plea to both of them to pray for a man named Victor. For some decades, it seems, the two apostles were honoured here, and some believe their relics were briefly hidden here during the persecution of 258. Nobody has ever proved it.

   Then came Sebastian, the soldier-martyr shot full of arrows, patron of archers and of plague victims. Tradition says he survived the arrows, confronted the emperor, was beaten to death, and was buried in this cemetery. Inside the basilica, a chapel of relics displays an arrow and part of a column said to be linked to his martyrdom. And the original Quo Vadis footprints you heard about at the fork are kept there too.

   In 2001, a scholar identified a marble bust of Christ in the convent here as the last sculpture of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, carved when he was in his eighties. It had been sitting there, almost unnoticed, for generations. Now walk on along the Appia. Just beyond, on the left, a long field of ruins opens behind a gate. That is where an emperor built his own racetrack.

10. 10. Villa of Maxentius: The Circus and the Tomb of Romulus

    Via Appia Antica 153, 00179 Roma RM, Italy

    Through the gate, a long, flat field stretches away from you, edged by low walls, with two broken brick towers marking where the starting gates once stood and a line of rubble running down the middle. You are looking along a chariot-racing track more than five hundred metres long, the best-preserved Roman circus anywhere.

    It was built in the early fourth century by Maxentius, the emperor who held Rome itself while rivals fought over the rest of the empire. Beside it stood his palace and, by the road, a great round mausoleum for his son Valerius Romulus, who died as a boy in 309. The name was no accident. Maxentius wanted Romans to think of the city's founder, and of himself as the man who would restore Rome to the centre of the world.

    It didn't work. In 312 Constantine marched on Rome. Maxentius rode out to meet him at the Milvian Bridge, was defeated, and drowned in the Tiber. The winner wrote the history: Maxentius became a tyrant, his monuments in the Forum were rededicated to Constantine, and his brand-new circus may never have seen more than a handful of races.

    Down the centre of the track ran the spina, and on it stood an obelisk carved with hieroglyphs in Rome for the emperor Domitian, then moved here by Maxentius. It lay broken in this field for centuries, until in 1651 Gian Lorenzo Bernini raised it above his Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona. So every visitor admiring that famous square is admiring a souvenir from this quiet meadow.

    Look back towards the road at the mausoleum of Romulus, half hidden behind a farmhouse built against it centuries later. A dome for a dead prince, a barn for the living. Now return to the Appia and walk on uphill. Ahead, the road is crowned by a huge round tower: the most famous tomb on the Queen of Roads.

11. 11. Tomb of Caecilia Metella: The Castle of the Ox Heads

    Via Appia Antica 161, 00178 Roma RM, Italy

    Stand before the massive drum of travertine on its square base, nearly thirty metres across, with a frieze of ox skulls and garlands running round the top and medieval battlements perched on it like a crown that doesn't quite fit. It is the most photographed tomb on the Appian Way, and the most theatrical.

    It was built in the last decades BC for a woman: Caecilia Metella, daughter of Quintus Caecilius Metellus Creticus, the general who conquered Crete, and wife of a Crassus, most likely a son of Marcus Crassus, the richest man in Rome and Julius Caesar's partner. Of her life we know almost nothing. No deeds, no portrait, no age. Only her name in marble on the side facing the road, and the biggest tomb in the neighbourhood.

    Those carved ox heads gave the whole area its medieval name, Capo di Bove, ox head. In the early 1300s the Caetani, the family of Pope Boniface the Eighth, turned the tomb into the keep of a fortress, added a palace and a Gothic church across the road, and charged tolls on everyone using the Appia. The roofless ruins of their church of San Nicola still stand opposite.

    Lord Byron came here in 1817 and wrote a string of stanzas in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage about this stern round tower, wondering who the woman inside had been, whether she was loved, whether she died young. Generals, popes, poets... all of them came to stare at the grave of a woman about whom history forgot to write a single line.

    From here the Appian Way runs on, almost straight, between pines and broken tombs, towards the Alban Hills and, more than five hundred kilometres away, Brindisi. You have walked from an emperor's baths to a Roman lady's tomb, past apostles, popes, martyrs and a forgotten racetrack. Take a last long look down the Queen of Roads... for centuries, travellers coming to Rome from the south passed this very tower, and knew the city was close.