“the Appian’s easier taken slow!” wrote Horace in 35 BCE (Satires, Rome, 35 BC, poem 5). Footstepping Horace – and his poem – the Scottish poet Alistair Elliot (1932 - 2018) wrote on The Appian Way in 1984. These texts, not those of Dickens, James, Goethe or Hawthorne, come closest to my own experience of the Queen of Roads (Regina Viarum) in their modern sensibility, tone and pace. In two Roman years, my proximity to the Appia Antica and the Arco di Druso (where the traceable Antica springs forth, going south from the city) the road in its Roman confines became a place of tranquility and succour.
“The panorama of our element rolls past… I long for maps to name the scars on hazy hills. Perhaps that slope once grew a famous wine…”
“But, feeling better as the tombs get poorer, walk on, reading the elegies – ‘hic soror et frater’ – listening to the stridor of cicadas…”
