L’assistenza ai viaggiatori lungo la via Appia, tra servizio di stato ed imprenditoria privata

We will briefly review a series of road-stations and other infrastructures functional to facilitating and assisting travellers along the Appian and Trajan Ways. This review will show how the modern classification of road-stations in mansiones and mutationes is too schematic and does not respect the vast diversity of archaeological and documentary evidence. It will be argued that this diversity is a direct consequence of the intensity of the urbanisation” of the Roman countryside in the Italian Peninsula and of the attractiveness of trafficked roads.