Itiner-e

[First posted in AWOL 28 May 2018, updated  10 November 2025 (new URLs)]

Itiner-e

Itiner-e aims to host the most detailed open digital dataset of roads in the entire Roman Empire. The data creation is a collaborative ongoing project edited by a scholarly community. Itiner-e allows you to view, query and download roads. Each road segment has a URI that allows it to be cited and linked by external resources. It also includes a route-finding tool to explore travel itineries and times in the ancient world (beta version).

Go to our Tutorials page to learn how to use all functions on Itiner-e.

How to cite Itiner-e

Brughmans, T., de Soto, P., Pažout, A. and Bjerregaard Vahlstrup, P. (2024) Itiner-e: the digital atlas of ancient roads. https://itiner-e.org/

License

Itiner-e: the digital atlas of ancient roads © 2024 by Brughmans, Pažout, de Soto and Bjerregaard Vahlstrup is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Download Full Dataset

Every night a full export of all route segments is created in ndjson format, where each line is a json route segment object.

A route segment object is structured like a GeoJSON LineString object with an additional property pleiadesPlaces representing the pleiades places in the vicinity of the route segment (only applied for roads, not for rivers or sea lanes).

The static version documented in de Soto et al. (2025) can be accessed on Zenodo:

de Soto, P. et al. (2025) A High-Resolution Dataset of Roads of the Roman Empire: Itiner-e static version 2024. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17122148

Acknowledgements

Danmarks Frie Forskningsfond (DFF) Sapere Aude research leadership grant (0163-00060B). Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF) Centre of Excellence for Urban Network Evolutions (UrbNet) (DNRF119). The Carlsberg Foundation Young Researcher Fellowship (CF21-0382).

We would like to thank Aarhus University’s Past Networks team, Social Resilience Lab, Clara Filet, Maria Coto Sarmiento, David Gal, Lukas Orehøj Røpke, Amanda Leighton Spatzek, Aarhus University’s Centre for Humanities Computing, Peter Bjerregaard Vahlstrup.

The Viator-e project was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Research and Universities.

Project RTI2018-098905-J-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe” by the “European Union”.

And see AWOL's Roundup of Resources on Ancient Geography