Roman roads were constructed in a way that little to no repairs would ever have to be made to maintain them. What’s impressive about the roads is that many of them, that stretch up to 55 miles long, are ruler straight.

 

Some roads were just leveled ground so they didn’t require much work other than to even out the land. Others were graveled or paved with blocks of stone or polygonal blocks of lava.There were many tools used during the building of roman roads, each one have a specific purpose. The tools were gromas, rods, ploughs, and spades.

 

 A rod and a groma were used when building roads to create perfect right angles. Gromatici, or rod men would place the rods down in a lines and a civil engineer would command them as needed to make the line as straight a possible. Libratores’s would begin using ploughs, sometimes with the help of legionaries who had spades, to dig down into the ground to the firmest part of the soil. The depth of each road varied on the terrain of the land.

 

The road bed is layered with rocks over stones and eventually filled up with large amounts of rubble, gravel, and any other fill they could find. When the ditch was filled to a meter from the top it was covered in gravel and tampered down in a process called pavire.

 

Some of the last steps to the process is a lime based concrete developed by the romans then a rudus, or fine layer of concrete went onto the statutem. The summa crusta is the polygonal squares of the road that are finally crowned for drainage.

 

When building the roads the romans preferred to to find solutions to obstacles in roads than to go around of change the course, by creating tunnels or other structures. Bridges were also of the romans forte as some are still standing today, the smaller bridges were built out of wood or possibly stone while the larger bridges were made of concrete. They also developed mile markers along the roads to measure how far a journey was and how much longer there was.