Via Popilia

NOTOC

The Via Popilia is the name of two different ancient Roman roads begun in the consulship of Publius Popilius Laenas. One was in southern Italy and the other was in north eastern Italy.

The road in southern Italy ran from the Via Appia at Capua to Rhegium on the Straits of Messina. The discovery the Polla Tablet found in the church of San Pietro di Polla (Salerno) with part of its itinerarium engraved on stone brought it more fully into the light of history. It was possibly built by Publius Popilius Laenas, consul of 132 BC, who founded Forum Popilii marked on the Tabula Peutingeriana. A milestone found in 1952 in Capua suggests that it was Annius who built and gave his name to the road, but he may have completed it. It ran a distance of 321 mile (517 km) through southern Campania and Calabria, through the interior of the country, not along the coast. The idea that the older course of the Via Popilia reached Atria finds possible support through the proposed reconstructions of the Via Annia which have it starting at Atria. This gives a picture of carefully planned and continuous route which follows the Italian regions on the upper Adriatic Sea. The two mentioned itineraries differ in their depiction of the course. The former presents a journey which was mainly through watercourses, rivers and lagoons connected to each other by a network of canals. The latter depicts a land route with staging posts (mansiones, plural of mansio). The Ariminum to Ravenna tract went by the Sabis mansio and the current Cervia saltworks. North of Ravenna it continued towards the lagoon of Comacchio flanking the Augusta canal commissioned by the emperor Augustus to connect Ravenna with the southern branch of the River Po, passing by the mansiones of Butrium and Augusta. The next mansio was Sacis ad Padum, near Spina, which was named after the Sagis branch of the Po. The road then crossed the Neronia canal and the Flavia canal and had the Neronia and Corniculani mansiones. It then reached the Hadriani mansio. Here the route split into two. The older one went to Atria. The other one went through the lagoon belt of the southern Veneto and reached Altinum. Slightly further north the road reached the now extinct Po Spinetico branch of the River Po, just before ancient Spina, just to the north of Comacchio. It then followed another extinct branch of the river, the Sagis, and reached the Sacis Ad Padum mansio, where a canal which was probably commissioned by the emperor Nero started. The road went through the Corniculani and Hadriani mansiones (perhaps in Codigoro and San Basiglio in the municipality of Ariano nel Polesine respectively). It then reached the Septem Maria (Seven Seas), which is indicated in the Antonine itinerary and was probably between Donada and Contarina in the municipality of Porto di Viro, close to Adria. The fossa Clodia canal started here, at the River Tartaro, and reached today's Chioggia in the Lagoon of Venice. The road then turned right, further inland, to reach Atria. It seems that in late antiquity after Hadriani the coastal road followed a different course from that of the Popilia, which turned towards Atria but was not indicated in the Tabula Peutingeriana. The road probably decayed precociously, which explains the loss of the road name and the deterioration of the road system.