The Spartacus revolt began at a gladiator school in Capua, climbed Mount Vesuvius, ran south to the Strait of Messina and ended on the Sele River in 71 BC. It was the Third Servile War, the largest slave uprising Rome ever faced.
The route follows the rebellion in order: the breakout of 73 BC, the siege on Vesuvius, the failed attempt to cross to Sicily, the last battle against Crassus and the crucifixions along the Appian Way. Ancient sources were written a century or more later and disagree in places, so the exact spots of the school and the battlefield are approximate.
The Via Appia, the Appian Way, ran from Rome through the Pontine Marshes, Terracina, Capua and Beneventum to the port of Brindisi, and parts of it can still be walked. It was begun in 312 BC.
The seven stops follow the road in order, from the Porta Appia gate and the Tomb of Caecilia Metella to the Spartacus story at Capua, the defeat of Pyrrhus at Beneventum and the column by the harbour at Brindisi. Several locations are approximate, as the road crossed whole regions.
Ida Pfeiffer's 1846–1848 journey around the world passed through Hamburg, the Brazilian forest, Tahiti and Baghdad, as her own book A Woman's Journey Round the World recounts. A 48-year-old Viennese widow with little money, she travelled mostly alone by cargo ship, horseback and caravan, and came home to a Vienna in revolution.
The route follows her first world journey in order, from her own book, A Woman's Journey Round the World: Hamburg, the Brazilian forest, Cape Horn and Valparaíso, Tahiti, Canton, Baghdad, Persia and home. There are no visitor tips for Iraq or Iran.
In 1791 Saint-Domingue was France's richest colony, a sugar and coffee economy worked by hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans under brutal conditions. Thirteen years later it was Haiti, the first nation born from a successful slave revolt and the first independent Black-led state in the Americas. The cost was enormous: some 200,000 Black Haitians died, and tens of thousands of French and British soldiers, most of them from yellow fever.
The route follows the turning points, from the ceremony that tradition places at Bois Caïman to the declaration at Gonaïves, with a detour to the French mountain fortress where Toussaint Louverture died. Fighting was savage on all sides, and the texts say so plainly. The route offers no travel advice for Haiti.
