Via Appia Found on Satellite Image

The Appian Way is perhaps the world's most celebrated road. On the outskirts of Rome it is a major tourist attraction. I have just discovered you can see some of its far reaches on photographs from space.

The Way seems to be the source of a common misconception in the English-speaking world that all Roman roads were solidly paved and ran straight as a laser, up hill and down dale, never yielding to the lie of the land. Beyond Terracina, much of the Via Appia was neither paved nor straight, but wriggled along long-worn prehistoric ridgeway routes, where the ground was drier (and harder) and the traveler had the best chance of spotting approaching attackers, whether they were bandits or bears.

Begun under the direction of Appius Claudius, a consul, in 312 BCE, the Via Appia initially connected Rome to Capua near Naples. Later it was extended to Brindisi on the Adriatic Coast. It was any physical traces of this latter extension that I was hoping to find while on a visit last week to Italy.

We were staying in the newly elegant city of Matera which is dolling itself up to be one of two European Capitals of Culture of 2019. In Roman times, Matera was just a remote warren of hand-hewn caves, never mentioned in the ancient sources. Perhaps it was a refuge of the above-mentioned bandits, who could murder a merchant on the Via Appia at dusk and carry the booty 15 kilometers away to the caves to hide it, safely holed up by midnight like the Ahlbergs' brigands:

Near Matera one finds two modern highways named Via Appia. The one beginning from Ferandina, national highway SS7, and proceeding via Matera to Massafra is a fake, although it too terminates at Brindisi. The other, Puglia provincial road SP28, marked "Strada Provinciale Appia" on maps, is, in some stretches at least, the real thing.

Recent articles by Luciano Piepoli dispense with the armchair scholarship (mainly German) about this part of the Via. They assemble new hard archaeological evidence about its course and stage-stops. Unfortunately Piepoli does not provide GIS geolocations (this ought to be prescribed by the style guides of every journal dealing with historical geography). He writes:

The Appian Way, at the exit from the current town of Gravina in Puglia, begins its path in a south-easterly direction near Scomunicata and, after having touched the localities of Graviscella and Ponte Padule Cardena, reaches the rocky outcrop of the Murgia Catena, located about 7 km southeast of Altamura. The road runs along the southern slope of this last location to Iesce, where there are the remains of an important settlement that had been abandoned by the 2nd century B.C. On the territory of Altamura, in a flat section between the southern slope of the Murgia Catena and the hillock of Montepovero, the projecting traces of wheel ruts are visible in the rocky surface for a length of about 200m and a total width of more than 30m, forming multiple lanes. Although they are not contemporary with one another, it appears highly probable by virtue of their topographical location that some of them must derive from the consular Via Appia. (My English, helped by Apple and Google Translate).

Hoping to see these traces of the wheels of ancient or medieval carts, we stopped our car on the shoulder of the SP28 at what we thought was the spot. Since a narrow lane of wheat was growing there on the verge of the road itself, we searched the rocky field behind it, but to no avail. On the point of giving up, and after nearly stepping on a sturdy snake, I finally discovered the ruts further up the road.

In the 50-second video above you may hear a cicada and will see the colorful wild flowers of a southern Italian spring including tall fennel, all growing in the dirt that has collected in the ruts.

The most pronounced track is at the left, close to the dry-stone wall. There are no doubt specialists who could estimate from the wheelbase whether this track is ancient or medieval. A second, shorter bunch of tracks can be found about 50m further down the hill (in a 24-second video). I have uploaded videos of both to my YouTube Channel.

The greatest surprise came later: these ruts are visible on common garden satellite imagery. When I studied the same location on Google Maps later, I was amazed to see the big set of ruts quite clearly at the location 40.76424, 16.61516 (tip: copy just this to any sat-nav or mapping app to find it):

As far as I know, this remarkable, aerially visible archaeological site is not listed on any of the ancient geographical portals such as the Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire, Pelagios or Vici. I can see how to add it to Vici (and will add it later), but I must admit that I have no idea yet how to contribute it to the former two. They do not offer any "guide for dummies" instructions.

These stone remains are no longer 30 meters wide, since the new road passes through the middle, and they do not seem to have gained any legal protection, although the feature is surely known locally. The IGM map of 1919 (reproduced as British AMS M791 of 1939) labels a nearby stretch of the road "od via antica Via Appia" (I don't know what "od" means).

Piepoli relies on a survey of the area by the great aerial archaeologist of the 1920s to the 1950s, Giuseppe Lugli, so I presume these remains are mentioned in Lugli's books or articles. As far as I can tell, they are the only surface evidence left of the ancient Via Appia between Gravina and Tarento.

The fact that wheels ran across bedrock here is an indication that the highway was unpaved. A few kilometers away, the route has been archaeologically excavated. Piepoli writes:

Near Masseria Capitolicchio Vecchia, recent excavations conducted by the Archaeological Superintendency of Puglia have highlighted a short stretch (about 200 x 4.90 m) of a road - of the glareata type - interpreted, on the basis of the construction technique, orientation and topographic context, as a segment of the Appian Way [Mattioli, 2002]. An interesting fact which emerged during the excavations is that the roadway is partially obliterated by a layer of relative collapse likely due to a structure located near the road axis. The ceramic finds and coins found can be dated between the end of the 2nd century BC and the 3rd century AD, which could be considered as a terminus post quem for the abandonment of the Via Appia in this section.

The simple glareata road had a base of stones, built up to a sand or gravel surface, and would be kicked or ground apart by heavy traffic if it were not maintained. This is probably what happened at 40.76424, 16.61516, exposing the bedrock to the grinding of cart and carriage wheels. Above, I mentioned a narrow crop of wheat growing in the queen's acre (the roadside). It too is clearly visible in the space imagery, and occupies what seems to have once been a ford through a seasonal stream, the Vulle. No doubt the silt, organic particles and the churning of the wheels created a fertile slough in this rocky landscape which, as the 1919 map shows, travelers had to edge around.

Most of the Via Appia in this area follows the watershed. Here's a more open location, looking towards the Murgia Catena from the north-west, where you may be able to see that the land slopes very lightly away to both sides.

To the left of this spot, the drop to the base of the valley is quite substantial, as the next image shows:

In an article this year, the scholar Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen compares the posterity of this southern Via Appia built in the 3rd century BCE to the highly engineered Via Traiana built with cuttings and bridges in the 2nd century CE. The bridges ultimately fell down, whereas the prehistoric footpaths and droving tracks along the watersheds proved indestructible. The self-maintaining character of ridgeway routes even after all their gravel has eroded away is the reason that the Via Appia remained in continuous medieval and modern use and was then resurfaced in the 20th century:

For the Roman traveler, the Via Traiana was a significant improvement. It was shorter, had far fewer inclines and declines and was less vulnerable to snowfall. But despite the many advantages of the Via Traiana, it is the Via Appia which has survived to this day. An estimated 90% of the total length of the Appia is still in use as graveled or asphalt road. Large portions of the Via Traiana, on the other hand, are overgrown and impassable. (My assisted translation from the Danish.) 

Bekker-Nielsen, Tønnes. ‘Romerske Veje i Syditalien: Via Appia Og via Traiana’. Vejhistorie, 2018. Academia.edu

Piepoli, Luciano. ‘Blera e Sub Lupatia (It. Ant. 121,4-5): Proposte per l'identificazione di due stazioni itinerarie lungo il tratto apulo della via Appia’. In Statio amoena: Sostare e vivere lungo le strade romane, edited by Patrizia Basso and Enrico Zanini. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2016.  Academia.edu

———. ‘Il percorso della via Appia antica nell'Apulia et Calabria: Stato dell'arte e nuove acquisizioni sul tratto Gravina-Taranto’, in Vetera Christianorum, 51, 2014, 239-261’. Academia.edu.

Bridge at Blumau

In a post one year ago, I described the ancient road through the Eisack gorge in the north of Italy. The other day I took a closer look at its major surviving Roman feature, the Bridge at Blumau or Prato all'Isarco. In this post I will use the German name of the town, since this community is in a German-speaking area.

As I have already explained, this road possessed enormous geopolitical importance, providing the quickest communication route to move troops, intelligence, materiel and goods between Germania and Italia through the Alps. One might argue that every bridge on this north-south route possessed equal importance, but the Blumau crossing, deep inside a narrow, obstructed gorge, was surely the most challenging and most expensive to build, maintain and defend.

Other important crossings like that at Waidbruck (Ponte Gardena) could be re-sited, or may even have had back-ups, but the Bridge at Blumau was quite simply irreplaceable: there was almost no other position at Blumau in which it could be be placed, and pontoons could not be used. Without the bridge, this all-seasons route would have been impassable. Any north-south communication, weather permitting, would have required at least an extra day via the Ritten Plateau or Völs route, or at least three extra days, via the more westerly Via Claudia Augusta over the 1,500-metre Reschen Pass. See my map.

All that remains of the bridge today is a stone abutment, which stands on the left or south bank of the river. This important monument is not signposted in any way, and it is fairly difficult to get a view of. You can lean right out from the parapet of the existing concrete bridge and see at least part of the stonework from above (in the bottom left quarter of this picture, which you can enlarge by clicking):

A better view is obtained by driving down an asphalted lane on the right bank, and scrambling over steep loose soil to the water's edge, down-river from the bridge. Here it is possible to stand on a sandbank and peer through fronds of trees, obtaining a view of how the abutment curves up into the beginning of an arch. Eight layers of stone remain. It may be that some of the collapsed bridge is still here in the river-bed.

The next picture shows the structure, with the arch of a 20th-century concrete bridge above it. The remains are in shadow at the centre of the picture. It might have been better to wait all day until the sunlight was not so bright and then take a picture, but my dear wife and son came along for this expedition and we had some other pleasures such as hiking to also accomplish that day, so this picture will have to do:

Probably the most recent professional description of one of Late Antiquity's most neuralgic sites is that by Vittorio Galliazzo, the great scholarly authority on Roman bridges, who examined the structure in 1999. I do not know much Italian, so I have used Bing and Google Translate to essay the following rough translation from pages 64-65 of his 2002 article, Ponti e Forme di Attraversamento di Corsi d’Acqua dell’Alto Adige in Età Romana. Please let me know if you can improve or correct the translation:

Near a site that has already yielded a milestone from the reign of Maxentius (CIL V 8054 = 463 IBR), the left abutment of an ancient bridge on the old road through the Eisack Valley, together with a section of an arch almost up to its waist, was found in 1930 about 5 kilometres east of Bolzano during reconstruction of a bridge that forms part of the Brenner Highway. Further investigation at the end of 1988 by Dr. Lorenzo Dal Ri of the Archaeological Heritage Office of Bolzano Province confirmed that these remains were probably Roman. An architect, Andrea Perin, subsequently suggested his own reconstruction in a sketch based on the scant reliable information available and a good deal of hypothesis.

From the details that follow, one understands what an engineering challenge the structure posed for its designers and builders: it  had to cross high-volume rapids that are susceptible to flash floods. Land access to the cramped site is blocked from north and south. No boats could be used. A huge wooden frame had to be assembled to hold the large number of wedgestones during construction.
No piles could be driven: the footings had to be carved out of solid rock.

The section that follows is awkward to follow without any picture, so I have inserted letters into Galliazzo's account in square brackets, so that you can see in this detail from my photo which layers he is talking about:

The abutment is approximately 4.50 m wide at its base and consists of four rows of blocks of compact yellowish stone of modest thickness [B1, B2, B3, B4] which protrude on the upstream side, as if to form a protective flank with the aid of the carefully modelled porphyry stone of the riverbank. The abutment is fitted into a cavity specially hollowed out of the dark porphyry rock [P] on the left bank, evened out as need be with sandstone slabs. The sector of arch, which is about 4 metres wide, tops this support structure and likewise consists of yellowish blocks of porphyry. One sees four rows of wedge-stones, three of them [A1, A2, A3] nearly intact and one fragmented [A4].
All the surviving structure of the abutment is in big chiselled blocks, tied with leaded iron clamps. Several stones, especially the upstream ones in the third and fourth row [B3, B4], have rusticated faces with listello or refesso drafted margins. The arch segment appears to have had an intrados in opus vittatum consisting of rather small blocks joined with hard lime.
From what I could see directly during a first inspection in 1994 and a subsequent survey in 1999, the first row from the bottom in the remaining sector of the arch [A1], that is to say counting up from the join, comprised four quadrangular, regularly dimensioned blocks, with a fifth flanking them upstream while a sixth downstream from them was tailored to fit into the “living” rock. This layer was surely used at the time of construction to support a hoop-shaped wooden scaffold and then probably re-used as the footing for the wooden beams of the later medieval bridge, which was no longer a stone arch but probably a wooden truss (i.e. a series of vertical stays supporting a horizontal wooden superstructure). At about 10 and 21 metres respectively from this ancient abutment, you can see the remains of two piers in the bed of the Eisack River on which uprights of the scaffolding for the boxing to construct the 1928-1930 concrete bridge stood before they collapsed.

Galliazo's article includes two black and white photographs evidently taken in winter when there was less vegetation obscuring the view. He also reproduces Perin's sketch although he repudiates its veracity. Galliazzo concludes with the following general assessment of the structure:

It seems that the whole bridge, from abutment to abutment, had a length of about 33-34 metres which could be feasibly crossed not with three arches as has been proposed in the draft reconstruction, but with just two asymmetrical arches. This would result in a bridge similar to that at Merano with arches supported on sturdy abutments built into the rock of the banks and one pier of considerable proportions outside the river current: the greater of the two arches would have been on the left of the river and would have needed to have a length of about 18-20 meters to straddle the channel, while the lesser arch would have had an opening of less than 8 meters and would have probably provided an extra discharge during floods to better withstand the water pressure.
As regards the dating of the structure, the arrangement of the stone blocks and the overall impression given by the remnant of the abutment would suggest engineering of the Imperial if not of the Late Antique period, perhaps replacing an earlier bridge in wood, a material that was very abundant in the region. The collapse of this structure must have occurred by the Middle Ages, since the medieval timber replacement can be dated in all likelihood to the first half of the fourteenth century. It would seem to date from between 1314, when Count Heinrich of Tyrol commissioned the entrepreneur H. Kunter by contract to open an Eisack valley trail, the Kuntersweg, and 1390, when a document includes mention of construction of a bridge at Blumau.

It is notable that Galliazzo rejects the hypothesis that the structure could be the Pons Drusi which is marked on the Peutinger Diagram but in no other documentary source. He and other authors of the Südtirol archaeology volume consider the Pons Drusi to have been a bridge in the heart of Bolzano.

I took only rough notes from his bibliography and have not read these further materials, so I apologize that I must offer these references here with incomplete titles. The 1930 report at page 366 of Archivio per l'Alto Adige that first pointed to the existence of these remains should also be added to this reading list:

Dal Ri, Lorenzo. “?Title unknown.” In La Venetia nell’area padano-danubiana: le vie di comunicazione: Convegno internazionale: Papers, edited by Guido Rosada. Padova: CEDAM, 1990. See 620-621.

Galliazzo, Vittorio. I ponti romani. Vol. 1. 2 vols. Treviso: Canova, 1995. See 149, 249, 399.

———. “Ponti e Forme di Attraversamento di Corsi d’Acqua dell’Alto Adige in Età Romana.” In Archäologie der Römerzeit in Südtirol. Beiträge und Forschungen. Forschungen zur Denkmalpflege in Südtirol, edited by Lorenzo Dal Ri and S. Di Stefano, 57-71. 1, 2002. [The article quoted in this post.]

———. , ed. Via Claudia Augusta: un’arteria alle origini dell’Europa: ipotesi, problemi, prospettive : atti del Convegno internazionale Feltre 24-25 settembre 1999. Comune di Feltre, 2002. See 233, 236.

Olivi, M. “?Title unknown (‘Strada Romana Bolzano-Ponte Gardena’ or similar).” Archeologia Veneta 7 (1984). See 256-257.

Tabarelli, Gian Maria. Strade Romane nel Trentino e nell’Alto Adige. Trento: Temi Ed., 1994. See 122-125.

Regrettably, this very important structure is not yet included (at the time of this posting) in Wikipedia's List of Roman Bridges.

In the Eisack Valley

I am in northern Italy looking out a hotel window at the Dolomite mountains and I am considering the feasibility of a passage through this countryside by Queen Cunigunde of Germany in November 1013 on her way to Rome to be crowned as Empress of the West. My flight of imagination has been prompted by Cunigunde’s ancestral stemma: back in March, I published a vector translation of it. It can be found both on this blog and on Piggin.Net. The original, the oldest extant stemma of a real-life family, was drawn up at some point between 1002 and 1024 to emphasize the queen's claim to imperial rank. It would be plausible to believe that she took this parchment drawing with her in her baggage when she passed through this landscape with her husband Henry and the imperial army.

Reconstructing the route used 1,000 years ago by Henry and Cunigunde is not easy. The main stops on the trip can be established from the Regesta Imperii, the summary, formerly printed and now online, of extant legal documents issued during the travels of the Holy Roman Emperors. Unlike the papal regesta, which were registers (the modern spelling) of correspondence compiled contemporaneously by papal secretaries, the imperial regesta are reconstructions: modern tabulations compiled by historians from widely scattered documents in archives. It is fairly plain from the regesta that Cunigunde, Henry and the army conducted a two-month crossing via the Brenner Pass from Augsburg in Germany to Pavia, capital of the Lombard kingdom of northern Italy, arriving in time for Christmas after being held up by floods in northern Italy.

November is perilously late in the season for an alpine crossing, even if you are in command of an imperial German army sworn to ensure your absolute safety. As winter approaches, the snowline is descending and the hours of daylight are growing short. Approached via Innsbruck, Austria from the north, the Brenner Pass is the lowest saddle in the main alpine watershed and therefore the safest track to use in late autumn. After crossing it at an elevation of only 1,370 metres, well below the treeline, the medieval track then descended toward Italy, following the valley of the Eisack (or Isarco) River. The principal impediment to the king, queen and their army - the size of this host is not recorded - was not the pass, but a 20-kilometre gorge further south where the Eisack rushes between towering rocky slopes and narrows at least twice between stony gates before reaching a wide plain at Bozen (Bolzano).

The archaeologists Laura Allavena Silverio and G. Rizzi (see the bibliography below) have presented evidence that the preferred prehistoric detour around this rugged barrier was a path on the left bank of the Eisack that rose to nearly 1,000 metres' altitude to circumvent two ravines, passing via the settlements of Seis and Völs and returning to the valley floor at Blumau (I will use German place-names since the majority population of the location today is German-speaking).

I have drawn a map showing the approximate course of this path (the river outline comes from OpenStreetMap). The prehistoric path - via Seis - is formed by a brown line. It can be see that it continues down the valley crossing two very difficult bluffs, the Gallibichl and the Hochklause. It may be that Cunigunde and Henry used this track, but as we will see, there was at least one other option.

Early in the 3rd century, the Romans built a deviation through the gorge stretching from Kollmann to Blumau. It was no doubt a marvel of engineering, employing two bridges, at Waidbruck and Blumau. These allowed the road to change from the left to the right bank and back to the left to take advantage of the most favourable footing. Other smaller bridges were needed to cross tributaries of the main river. It is represented by the red line on the map.

The entire Kollmann-Bozen road through the valley is known as the Kuntersweg in honour of a late medieval restoration of the Roman route by an enterprising businessman, Heinrich Kunter, and it still remains in use, somewhat widened and straightened with the help of tunnels, as the SS12, an Italian national highway. 

Engineers have progressively widened the gorge in the past thousand years to also accommodate a double-track railway, an autostrada (the Brenner Autobahn) and a cycleway and we no longer see much of the Roman/medieval riverside track, but close attention from a car gives some idea of the obstacles that had to be negotiated. Proceeding downstream, the gorge becomes twisting from Atzwang onwards. In an image on Google Street View (slow loading!), one can see why a tunnel had to be built for today's freeway: there is simply no space in the valley at the left of the picture to accommodate a wide road. 

 It is not uniformly narrow. There are quite a few wide places in the gorge: But in its original state, there were also many gatelike points where the river slipped through fissures and the steep mountain walls left little room for any road. These rock formations jutting into the river's course were the principle obstacles to transit in the prehistoric, Roman and medieval period. I have already mentioned the two located just west of Blumau: the Gallibichl and the Hochklause. From the lie of the river and the location of settlements, I suspect there were formerly such gate points at Atzwang and Steg, but if so they have been quarried away.

This route from Blumau to Kardaun is described in detail by the historian Norbert Mumelter in his brief survey of the Kuntersweg (see the bibliography below). Until explosives were used for the first time in 1607-1608 to blast the Gallibichl and Hochklause, there was no way round these bluffs and they had to be surmounted by steep tracks rising high above the valley floor. Perhaps the Romans operated some kind of mansio (travellers' rest with spare horses for hire) at these bluffs to provide teams of additional horses, mules or oxen to draw carts up the inclines and lower them without crashing on the other side. Kunter and his successors certainly did. Centuries of civil engineering have been needed to defeat these obstacles. Here are some images (slow loading!) from Google Street View and Bing Street Side, firstly of the much diminished Gallibichl:

• from the east, crossed by power lines
• an aerial view showing the houses currently on its top

and secondly of the Hochklause:

• from the east, punctured by the highway tunnel with a small vineyard on top
• the ledge road that was begun in 1607-1608 at the water's edge
• an aerial view showing the vineyard and the two roads.

The existence of any Roman-era deviation along the floor of the gorge has been sometimes doubted, but Allavena Silverio and Rizzi have recently published detailed evidence for it, stating that the remains of the Roman bridge near Blumau are still clearly visible. Segmentum IV of the Peutinger Map (original or redrawn, link at right to Talbert) displays the Roman road through the Eisack Valley with the stops Vepiteno - 35 - Sublabione - 13 - Pontedrusi. The unusually short, 13-mile stage between Sublabione (Klausen, number 275,5 in the Antonine Itinerary) and Pontedrusi (Bozen) is an indication that although not much ground was covered, it was a particularly difficult stage which could occupy a complete day to travel. Mansio Sebatum, the newly opened museum of Roman roads at St Lorenzen, includes the gorge road on its map (much more detailed than the Peutinger) of the Roman-era road network in the area.

However the very knowledge that a Roman road had existed before Kunter's engineers set to work seems to have been lost until the discovery in about 1500 of a Roman milestone on or near the Gallibichl. The engraving on the stone names the soldier-emperor Maxentius and can thus be dated to about 310 CE (Mumelter, 28). It may be that Kunter's business model was to revive Roman roads while giving the impression that he was designer of highways through virgin territory: Mumelter mentions other trade roads with the name Kuntersweg in Austria which may have also been makeovers of Roman routes by Kunter or his relations.

The state in 1013 of the Roman road through the Eisack gorge is impossible to determine. With the abdication of the last western emperor, Romulus Augustus, in 476 and the takeover of Italy by the Germanic warlord Odoacer, Roman imperial control of the Italian highway system ceased, at least in the formal sense that the administration was "imperial". The Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy which succeeded the Empire here may have conducted some minimal maintenance of its roads. The Carolingian empire probably applied funds to maintain one or other heerstrasse since major highways remained a key to political control.

However it can be assumed with good reason that the Roman deviation had become impassable by 1013. As soon as either of the bridges at its endpoints (at Waidbruck or Blumau) collapsed, the road would have become a cul-de-sac. The Eisack is too swift to cross by ferry or fording. Even if that had not happened, the lesser bridges or embankments may have been washed out by floods. Or a rockslide may have ripped away one of the ledges on which the road was built. Or else the road may have been deliberately wrecked in the course of warfare during the five centuries prior to Cunigunde's and Henry's passage.

Whatever happened, it is plain that medieval regional governments lacked the resources - and perhaps the motivation - to tend such a high-maintenance road over the span of more than eight centuries until Kunter arrived on the scene and obtained his concession on 1314 September 22 to clear a footpath through the gorge for pedestrians, mounted travellers, packhorses and cattle. He plainly followed the same route as the Romans had used, restoring the bridges at Waidbruck and Blumau and adding a third crossing at Kardaun, the Feigenbrücke, so that the road could end in the city of Bozen. But in time, Kunter's road also eroded away, prompting a dramatic description by a German priest, Felix Faber, of the terrors of negotiating it (in Latin, quoted by Mumelter). Faber described the sheer drop to his right and a rock wall pressing on his left, as he made his way along the left bank of the gorge towards Jerusalem in April 1480.

Back in Cunigunde's day, large military formations arriving in the region via the Brenner Pass may well have proceeded along the left-bank route following the mountain slope via Seis and Völs, but it is generally believed that medieval Rome-bound German imperial convoys routinely adopted a third route, cutting their way across the Ritten Plateau on the right bank of the Eisack River, 900 metres higher than Bozen. The principal evidence for this alternative upland detour is the existence from about 1200 (long after Cunigunde's passage) of a hospice for travellers at Lengmoos, 1,164 metres above sea level, the highest point of the crossing. After the (re-)opening of the Kuntersweg, traffic across the plateau tailed off and the hospice was converted into a feudal manor of the Teutonic Order of Knights. The current building, the Kommende, dates from the 17th century, and nowadays hosts an open-air theatre show every summer. The exact Ritten route is poorly documented, but is generally held to have begun (when heading downstream) at Kollmann, rising gradually to the plateau via Lengstein, then steeply descending to Rentsch, a suburb of Bozen, joining up with what was later to become Kunter's highway. 

Allavena Silverio and Rizzi advance the reasonable argument that the upland roads on both the left bank and right bank are not only extremely ancient, but that they remained well trodden even when the Roman road led through the gorge in Late Antiquity. A bare track might easily remain in use despite the existence of a well maintained imperial road or heerstrasse in the vicinity. Incentives for certain travellers to "go a different way" would have included avoiding surveillance, tolls and customs duties. Moreover, historians point out that the Roman legions and the cursus publicus always had a prior claim on use of the main road. Besides, the road over the Atwzang, Steg, Gallibichl and Hochklause may never have been safe for heavy carts with wider wheelbases. It may be that the Ritten route was compulsory for "heavy goods vehicles". Near Lengmoos are rocks which local antiquarians say have become rutted from being passed over by countless iron wheels over the centuries.

In terms of altitude, a crossing of the Ritten Plateau was every bit as arduous as crossing the Brenner Pass, but it may not have been as unappealing to the medieval traveller as we might be inclined to think. In our day we assume that the best road is one that reaches its objective with a modest gradient. But this judgement is conditioned by our constant use of motorized vehicles, whether they are cars or trains. When vehicles were drawn by beasts, steep gradients might be accepted because the ideal road was hard-surfaced and free of hairpin bends: stony soil, dry ridgeways, holloways and corduroy were employed so that carts did not bog down or overturn. When the traffic was limbed - pedestrians, mounts and cattle - roads could be even steeper, resembling flights of stairs: the ideal road was the least number of strides where one could maintain a foothold, even if it led up a cliff. 

Last week I tried out the latter class of "good" road: a steep track ascending the 850 metres from Steg, on the edge of the Eisack River up to Klobenstein, which is just above Lengmoos. Klobenstein is the principal town on the Ritten Plateau. Our party of three needed five hours in summer weather with the temperature above 30 degrees celsius to complete the ascent, though the signboard at the start at Steg suggested hikers in good physical condition ought to manage it in half the time. I was nevertheless surprised that the climb could be accomplished in just a morning, and I suppose a complete army could have been taken up such a hill within the space of a day. Our route had of course been cleared for us. The only obstacles were long grass, nettles and sometimes slippery gravel. The track passed the ruins of Burg Stein, a 13th-century castle. In the farmed areas higher up the ascent, the steep path is paved with big, rough stones, probably dating from the 18th or 19th centuries. One supposes that horses were often lashed to death by carters and peasants as the draught teams struggled to haul loads up such routes.

Cunigunde of course saw no castles: the era when Europe's main routes of travel became lined with fortresses was centuries in the future. There were also no paved tracks up the mountain. The royal party, their force of mounted knights and foot-soldiers and all their pack animals probably left the valley floor at Kollmann to gradually climb through the chilly woods to the Ritten Plateau following a route that is still in use today as a narrow, winding, asphalted country road. It would not have been signposted or blazed. The party probably had to rely on local guides or some other form of pilot. 

The queen may not have found the ascent and descent physically strenuous, since she probably rode on one or more palfreys, but it is likely to have been psychologically disturbing to her. 

Modern tourists enjoy the grandeur of the scenery as seen from the Ritten Plateau: a vast, cold grey block of stone, the Schlern, flanked by jagged pinnacles, rises to an altitude of 2,500 metres. Dense evergreen forests, dotted with giant boulders, spill down to the river edge. But to a medieval German queen, the whole scene would have been fearsome and chilling, with the effect heightened by the cold and the fear of attack by enemies or wild beasts. The sheer strangeness of the landscape with the jagged, pale grey crags of the Dolomites seeming so close at hand would have unnerved and frightened her. In the foreground she may well have seen the Ritten's fields of fairy chimneys: bizarre towers of soft rock, many of them five to ten metres high. Each of these pinnacles is topped by a round, hard boulder which has protected the stone below it from erosion by rain. Medieval travellers were told (and believed that) the boulders had been lifted onto the pinnacles by playful giants.

After the exhausting ascent on horseback to Lengmoos, where the army would have set up camp in some more or less level clearing on the plateau, collecting dry timber from the woods for fires and perhaps stealing livestock for food from any peasants who had not fled in time, Cunigunde had to steel herself for the vertigo of a slithering 900-metre vertical descent by an even steeper muddy track from the plateau to the alluvial plain where the Eisack river flows into the Adige river. Her transit of the Alps was neither picturesque nor enjoyable.

Further Reading

Allavena Silverio, Laura, and G Rizzi. ‘La strada romana di Elvas nella viabilità antica della Valle Isarco’. In Archäologie der Römerzeit in Südtirol. Beiträge und Forschungen. Forschungen zur Denkmalpflege in Südtirol, edited by L Dal Ri and S Di Stefano, 511–. 1, 2002.

Mumelter, Norbert. Der Kuntersweg. Bozen: Gemeinde Karneid, 1986.