The Appian Way Regional Park and the City of Rome

The "Via Appia", considered a "regina viarium" (the queen of streets), was one of the earliest and strategically most important Roman roads of ancient Rome. It connected Rome to Brindisi in southeast Italy, opening the Italian peninsula to the East, thus offering to Rome direct access to all trade routes with Greece, Egypt and the Orient and a privileged conduit for military expeditions. The wealth of trade favoured the emergence of a variety of activities (productive, economic, residential, etc.) also along the street. The idea for a large scale archaeological park starting from the center of Rome and reaching out to the countryside, up to the Alban Hills, dates back to the Napoleonic period. However, only in 1988, the "Appia Antica Regional Park", was constituted by Lazio Region, after tens of petitions and projects struggling for the defence of the Appia Antica and its monuments. The park has a surface of about 3.400 hectares and comprises only 16 km of the Antique Appian street, while nowadays more than 2.500 illegal buildings are calculated within its boundaries. The presentation offers an overview of the evolution of the park and policies of archaeological heritage protection compared to urban development of the city of Rome