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Comment by busyant | Hacker News Reader

Pretty cool.

My parents grew up in small villages that are adjacent to one of these ancient roads (via Tiburtina: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via_Tiburtina) and the road basically still exists as a modern road.

I remember driving near Pescara with my parents in the 1990s--they had not been back to Italy in 35+ years and they were trying to find their way back to their home towns.

We stopped the car on the side of a main road and asked a woman who was walking, "Dov'e' la Tiburtina?" (where is the Tiburtina?).

The woman responded... "QUEST'E' la Tiburtina!" (This is the Tiburtina).

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Newer but similar thing with Old Spanish Trail through the southern US (and similar historic trails).

So many roads named after something or named some nostalgic but generic thing, that no one realizes when they are actually driving on the modernized version of the real thing.

Among other things, it seems most expect there to be a route 66 style or (american) rail-row insitu abandoned artifact of these roads (which do sometimes exist in stretches of realignment) but don't realize that un-abandoned places generally aren't going to abandon their roads.

ETA: Old Spanish Trail went from the Atlantic coast of Florida to the Pacific along the Gulf Coast then continued west. But the places with continuous use to today from Texas east are now more often excluded from 'Old Spanish Trail' maps.

El Camino Real in California is now just another road full of strip malls going through Mountain View and Palo Alto.

The road retained its name in part of Silicon Valley, but the 101 follows the Camino Real as it continues south. There are commemorative markers.

The only dead straight main road out of London runs very close to my house. It was the Roman military road out London and ran for a couple of hundred miles. In Saxon times it was called Watling Street.

I assume this is the A5? That's very cool, I always thought it was odd how straight it is.

A5 north west of London and the A2 running south east of London

Cricklewood Broadway on my bit :-)

That's not the only one. A10 from Shoreditch to Hertfordshire is dead straight and follows the route of Ermine Street, the Roman road from London to York.

Ha, funny - we visited London for a week last autumn and stayed in Kilburn near the old Paddington cemetery, and every time we took the bus into the city I found it strange how straight that road was.

I knew someone at school who got a summer job identifying lost native trails. The government wanted to resurrect them as modern trails. The result: basically every trail would have been down the middle of a divided highway or along a railway track. It turns out that native people's then didn't like walking up and down hills anymore than cars and trains do today. The project was axed.

Never thought I would read about Pescara on HN! What a small world! :)

via Aemilia, now Emilia, is alive and well all the way from Milano to Rimini. It changes name a few times, mostly with additions (e.g. "Emilia Levante" to the East of Bologna, "Emilia Ponente" to the West, etc), but it's still the same road going through a billion towns and cities...

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