The Via Appia Antica stretches 350 miles from Rome to Brindisi, yet its first nine miles hold the densest concentration of ancient funerary monuments in Europe. Constructed in 312 BCE by censor Appius Claudius Caecus, the road served as Rome's strategic artery to the southern empire, its basalt paving stones worn smooth by two millennia of cart wheels and legionary sandals. Along its edges, aristocratic families erected elaborate tombs—the law forbade burial inside city walls—transforming the route into a processional avenue of marble sarcophagi, cylindrical mausolea, and underground catacombs that now honeycomb the tufa bedrock beneath the surface. The Catacombs of San Callisto alone contain sixteen miles of subterranean galleries carved between the second and fourth centuries, sheltering the remains of sixteen popes and half a million Christians. Frescoes of fish, anchors, and the Good Shepherd survive in burial niches where families once gathered for refrigeria—memorial meals held at the grave. Above ground, the Parco degli Acquedotti preserves seven of Rome's eleven aqueducts, their brick arches marching across open fields in geometric repetition. The Aqua Claudia, completed in 52 CE, carried water from springs thirty miles east, its channel elevated on arches reaching 100 feet at their highest point. Engineers calculated gradients to within one percent, ensuring gravity alone could deliver 200,000 cubic meters daily to the city's fountains, baths, and private households. Today the Appian Way corridor functions as both archaeological park and working farm, where sheep graze between tombs and cyclists navigate the same cambered stones that carried Spartacus' rebel army and Saint Paul's prison escort. The European greenway network incorporated the route in 2015, linking it to broader cycling infrastructure. Visiting the site by e-bike allows coverage of the full nine-kilometer stretch from Porta San Sebastiano to the Tomb of Cecilia Metella, a distance that combines underground catacomb chambers with open-air aqueduct ruins. Morning light renders the basalt roadway in sharp relief, while afternoon shadows lengthen across the Campagna Romana, the flat agricultural plain that still frames the aqueducts as they appeared in eighteenth-century Grand Tour etchings.