Alongside the legions, the miliaria marked the power of the Roman Empire. Placed every mille passus or Roman mile (1,478.5 meters), these cylindrical or rectangular stone markers punctuated the Roman roads, much as kilometer posts do on highways today.

A large group of researchers has turned to the latest technology to delve into historical and archaeological records in order to reconstruct the road map from 2,000 years ago. What they discovered is that it was far more extensive — almost twice as large as previously believed. They also found that very little of its original layout remains. The results of their work, published in Scientific Data, have been compiled and made publicly available on Itiner-e, a digital atlas of the roads that began or ended in Rome.

“When you walk along a sunken path worn down by time and travelers, people still say, ‘this used to be a Roman road,’ but the Romans built them to last,” says Pau de Soto, of the Archaeology Research Group at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and lead author of this impressive study. “Another misconception we wanted to dispel is that they were paved with stone slabs, like the Via Appia. In fact, they were built in successive layers of gravel, each finer than the last, with the top layer made of compacted fine gravel. That was best for horses, which at the time still didn’t wear horseshoes,” adds the archaeologist.

Like modern roads, they were raised above the surrounding terrain and given a slight slope to drain water. “The first modern roads were built following the Roman model,” the archaeologist notes.

Pau de Soto and some 20 researchers used modern GIS (Geographic Information System) techniques to unearth the layout of the Roman roads. “GIS is the foundation of modern archaeological research,” says the UAB researcher.

They combined historical texts such as the Itinerarium Antonini and the Tabula Peutingeriana — the closest thing to a road map from antiquity — with studies on archaeological sites and books on Roman history. “But we also used 19th- and 20th-century topographic maps, postwar aerial photographs taken by the Americans, and satellite images; GIS allows you to combine data from all these sources and project it onto the terrain,” De Soto adds.

The result of combining so many sources is that, around the year 150 CE — when the Roman Empire was at the height of its expansion, spanning about four million square kilometers (1.5 million square miles) — the network comprised 299,171 kilometers (about 186,000 miles) of roads. This figure adds more than 100,000 kilometers (62,000 miles) to the 188,555 kilometers (117,000 miles) counted in earlier studies and is equivalent to circling the planet seven times. In Spain alone, the length of Roman roads exceeded 40,000 kilometers (24,850 miles) — twice what had been estimated. At that time there was no radial distribution centered on Madrid, as with modern highways, but from cities like Augusta Emerita (Mérida), the capital of Roman Lusitania, several major routes branched out.

The authors of the new study estimate that one-third of the roads connected the main urban centers, while the remaining two-thirds were secondary routes linking settlements on a local or regional scale. However, they found that there is certainty for only 2.7% of the total mileage. “That’s what still survives or has been excavated in archaeological work,” De Soto explains.

For the vast majority of Roman roads — nearly 90% — there are only traces suggesting where they must have been: “In landscape archaeology we call them fossilized axes, which might be a Roman bridge, remnants of a road at a city’s outskirts, or the discovery of a miliarium,” says De Soto.

Everything indicates that a road must have linked those elements. What GIS does is model the most plausible route between them, taking into account the terrain’s topography — such as a mountain pass or a river crossing. Another 7% of the map’s total is purely hypothetical: if two Roman cities lie close to each other and both have road remains at their exits, it’s reasonable to assume they were once connected by a road.

“The Roman roads—and the transport network as a whole—were absolutely crucial to maintaining the Roman Empire,” says historian Adam Pažout of Aarhus University in Denmark, a coauthor of the study. “The Romans devised an intricate transportation system made up of inns, roadside stations, and relay points for couriers and public officials traveling across Italy and the provinces,” he recalls.

For Pažout, “the roads formed a framework that allowed Roman power to be projected — whether through the army, the law, or administration — and that held the Empire together.”

According to the authors, their work will allow for a better understanding of Rome’s history. Along these roads, millions of people traveled, new ideas and beliefs spread, and Roman legions and merchants moved between the far-flung corners of the three continents that made up the Empire. But these routes — whose immense reach is only now being fully revealed — also helped spread diseases and plagues such as the Antonine smallpox or measles epidemic, and the Justinianic bubonic plague, both of which weakened the Empire. They may even have served as the pathways for successive barbarian invasions.

What remains of the Roman roads, though not many miles in physical length, still forms part of Europe’s framework. As archaeologist Pau de Soto reminds us: “Europe’s urban fabric is a legacy of Rome. Most European cities already existed in Roman times — and were already connected to one another.”

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Zohran Mamdani — a 34-year-old with a degree in African Studies, born in Kampala, the capital of Uganda — will be the next mayor of New York City. He will do so after winning more than 50% of the vote, a remarkable feat. And the list of historic firsts he represents for New York’s mayoralty is long: he will be the first Muslim, the first socialist, and the youngest person to hold the office in more than a century. Yet, despite these firsts, Mamdani also embodies a certain continuity with a lesser-discussed feature of the Democratic Party in recent years: like Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg, Mamdani is the child of socialist immigrants.

The socialism of these parents was forged during the revolutionary decades of the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1960s, Obama’s father held a senior position in Kenya’s Ministry of Economics, serving as a self-critical socialist within the economic project led by the charismatic hero of independent Kenya, Tom Mboya. Around the same time, amid the civil rights movement in the United States, Harris’s parents met at a rally of the Afro-American Association. Both went on to earn doctorates: her mother in endocrinology — channeling her political fervor into advancing breast cancer research — and her father in economics, studying to what extent the anti-colonial politics of his native Jamaica could be applied to his adopted country, the United States.

As for Buttigieg’s father, he became the leading philologist of Antonio Gramsci’s work. Even in 2018, when I met him for the first and last time, his constellation of references for understanding contemporary politics was still rooted in the Italy of Pier Paolo Pasolini, autonomism, and the Fiat factory protests.

Mamdani’s parents share a similar political trajectory. His father, a Ugandan like him, arrived in the United States in 1963 on a scholarship for students from East Africa. As a student, he took part in north–south trips organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He later channeled that activism into an academic career focused on the analysis of colonialism, postcolonialism, and minority groups in Africa.

His mother, born in India, developed her political awareness in the street theater of Delhi. Upon arriving in the United States as a student, she also became a filmmaker, directing films that subtly challenged Hollywood prejudices: screenplays shot in foreign working-class neighborhoods, romantic comedies set against historical political backdrops, and casts without white actors.

Unlike other Democrats with socialist parents, Mamdani has not tried to distance himself from his parents’ legacy. Every move he makes on the political chessboard alludes to family politics. His activism against the siege of Gaza — whose importance to his political career has been compared to the role that opposition to the Iraq War played in Obama’s — is directly tied to his father’s anti-colonial critique. His proposals for free childcare, rent freezes, and municipally owned supermarkets echo the many domestic tensions over money that appear in Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding, and other films by his mother.

To his detractors, all this might sound like the plot of a Houellebecq novel: a charismatic young Muslim politician, a Trojan horse deceiving well-meaning voters, a society unwittingly sliding into decline. But in reality, what it signals is an attempt to build a new coalition that brings together the young, immigrants, workers, debtors, Muslims, students, tenants, and parents — a rainbow coalition that leaves no one behind. Except the billionaires.

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Greisa Martínez Rosas, the executive director of United We Dream — the largest network of young migrants in the United States — witnessed a group of students, as she was leaving school, place a garbage bag over a friend’s head. “They spun him around and around and yelled, ‘Go back to Mexico.’”

She has another memory from that same time, of a phone call she received during her first year of college, when she was preparing to return home to Texas for spring break in 2007. “My mom told me, ‘They got him.’ That was all. She and I knew what she was talking about. It was the family’s recurring nightmare, that one of us would be separated from our family for being a migrant.”

Her father, a man who at that time was the same age Rosas is now, 37, who brought her to the United States from Mexico as a child, the carpenter who supported her and her three younger sisters, had been arrested for not having a license to drive the old pickup truck he used to get to work every day. He was later deported.

Rosas’ long journey on the path of activism begins there, in those memories, and it’s not over yet. Especially not now: “My story is what gives me the courage and strength to continue, but it’s not unique; millions have experienced it.”

When her father was facing deportation, no one in the family knew anything about the law, lawyers, or how much such things cost. “We had to learn very quickly, and unfortunately, we didn’t have good legal advice.” The $5,000 the family borrowed to avoid deportation was useless. So life changed. “The head of the family, the one who brought money home, was gone. My mom had to start working, the bills were impossible to pay, my sisters were little, it was such a difficult time.” The following year, her mother was diagnosed with cancer, so Rosas had to drop out of school.

Today she is convinced that the burden a migrant carries is built upon the systemic ills of the United States. “It’s the story of how systems are working together to make life difficult for migrants,” she asserts. “It’s not just migration; it’s also about access to healthcare and higher education. That’s why I joined United We Dream.”

Since 2010, the organization, 60% of whose members are women and 20% identify as LGBTQ+, has worked to help, support, and empower young migrants. Now, United We Dream, in conjunction with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Abundant Futures Fund (AFF), has launched an unprecedented initiative: the Our Neighbors Defense Fund, which aims to raise at least $30 million to financially support legal organizations.

“We set out to do something new for our organizations,” Rosas says. “The hope is that millions of people will feel inspired to do something different right now, to be part of the solution. We know this is an opportunity for those who feel hopeless, who don’t know what to do, or who are perhaps afraid to take to the streets and participate in the protests.”

Less than three months had passed since Donald Trump’s return to the White House when the new administration made an announcement that would leave many in limbo: federal programs that sustained organizations and groups, which in turn helped thousands of migrants navigate the U.S. justice system, were canceled. Many of these migrants were minors who, without resources, have now had to appear before a judge alone. The toll, according to Rosas, is incalculable.

“The price is also some lives we’ve lost while they were in detention centers, waiting for a lawyer to have a hearing with a judge,” she says. “This is a matter of life or death for many people. Every month, we announce the deaths of approximately one or two migrants in detention centers, from different causes, but what they all have in common is that they were detained. It’s not normal. Unfortunately, this is a moment that our history books will record, and we all have to have an answer to the question: What did you do when people were suffering like this? None of us are safe; the only salvation is for us to stand together as a community, to reach out to one another. And this fund and our organization are two answers to how to do that.”

In a country with 11 million households that have at least one family member at risk of detention or deportation, where many lack the funds to afford legal representation, this fund, according to its founders, “will help ensure that immigrant families facing the threat of unjust separation, detention, and deportation have access to lawyers.” To date, they have raised over $12 million. Individual donations have totaled approximately $250,000 from some 10,000 people across the country.

“This is an opportunity for them to take action, to help our families,” Rosas says. “Today there are undocumented youths in detention centers, children forced to represent themselves before an immigration judge. So this is a legal emergency to guarantee due process, which is so fundamental to democracy. Because what is happening is not only going to affect immigrants, it’s going to affect all of us.”

According to Rosas, the money they receive goes immediately to the organizations they support. “What’s striking about this fund is that the money raised has come mostly from individuals, whether they have a lot or a little.” The activist — who has personally felt the impact of deportation and has fought more than one battle for the migrant community in the country, including for the “Dreamers,” which later led her to become a DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) recipient — has no doubt that the United States is experiencing unprecedented events.

“The people in control of this government want unlimited power, without consequences. Many people came to this country fleeing authoritarian governments, and that’s what’s happening here now. It’s something that hasn’t happened at this level before,” she maintains. “This isn’t just about whether you’re undocumented or not; we’re seeing young people born in this country being detained by ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], [and the administration is] using immigration to give unlimited power and money to agencies like that. So we have to act with great courage, with great clarity, and understand that this isn’t just about undocumented people or migrants, but about whether or not we’re going to be able to maintain democracy.”

Rosas has felt the weight of the hatred that keeps American society so polarized today. At the beginning of the year, in front of thousands of listeners, she acknowledged that she had lived as an undocumented immigrant in the country, and that, nevertheless, she “wasn’t afraid.” That was enough for several members of the MAGA movement to turn against her after the talk.

“They used my image, demanded my deportation, and tried to humiliate me. And although I lived in great fear this year, I’m not actually afraid,” she says. “I’ve survived difficult things. I’m not 17 anymore. I’ve been part of a student movement that has had victories and changed the trajectory of this country. My intention is that even if people feel afraid right now, in the future they’ll understand that we survived this together. That’s why I work every day.”

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