Section 1

Continents & Countries

At least for Europe it is obvious: all roads lead to Rome! You can reach the eternal city on almost 500,000 routes from all across the continent. Which road would you take?

To approach one of the biggest unsolved quests of mobility, the first question we asked ourselves was: where do you start from, when you want to know every road to Rome? We aligned starting points in a 26,503,452 km² grid covering all of Europe. Every cell of this grid contains a starting point to one of our journeys to Rome.

Now that we had our 486,713 starting points we needed to find out how we could reach Rome. For this we created an algorithm that calculated one route for every trip. The more often a specific single street segment was used, the stronger it is displayed on the map. The maps as an outcome of this project are somewhere between information visualization and data art, unveiling mobility on a very large scale.

The saying "all roads lead to Rome" might refer to a bronze monument built in 20 BC called Miliarum Aureum (lat. "Golden Milestone"). This milestone was located in Rome and erected by the Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus. The Miliarum Aureum was used as a reference point for travelling throughout the Roman Empire. It was considered that all roads lead to this monument.