(via) One way to begin grasp the depth and breadth of Ancient Rome’s success as an empire is to just stand back and look at a map of one of the more important pillars that supported it: a network of roads linking its 113 provinces. Through Rome’s rise and fall (starting in 300 BC) engineers created an estimated 400,000 km worth of interconnecting roads wide enough for two wheeled carts to pass each other with room to spare (depending on the type of road, the widths varied from 4 to 12 metres wide). Over 80,000 km of these roads were fully paved.

This incredible, empire-enabling network stretched from the Via Britannica in the UK to the Via Traiana Nova in the Middle East. It has been artfully imagined as a subway map by University of Chicago statistics major, Sasha Trubetskoy. He has made the totality of Ancient Rome’s achievement all the more interpretable – even though it’s entirely in Latin – for people who are now two thousand years removed from it.

Trubetskoy is selling high-resolution, print-worthy PDFs of his map via Paypal for $9 USD.