Roads in Italy/Sicily: When to use gravel, dirt, paved, etc.

[kohlenklau]

Well, I am down in the weeds doing the map for my scenario "Salvate il Maggiore Rinetti (Saving Major Rinetti)"

What type material roads should be seen in various parts of Sicily?

I would imagine very few paved roads, maybe only in the big city locales?

But would a smaller town get a gravel road or just dirt? Or cobblestones in the piazzas?

Thinking anticipatingly forward, does this change much as we head up to Salerno and Anzio?

Need some Italian road construction grogs I suppose...

Grazie!

[MikeyD]

Not sure if this relates to anything, but I was reading a NZ unit history and the author made a point of commenting on how well constructed the italians roads were. I think he called them a thing of beauty. That was mainland Italy, not Sicily but probably still applies. A wild 'based-on-nothing' guess would be either very good or very bad. You turn off government roads onto farm tracts. Just a guess on my part.

[kohlenklau]

Thanks MikeyD

Now I am going through my books and seeing any photos.

Photo shows jeep trying to drive through super thick mud.

Roads turned to mud when it rained gives a good clue!

Another photo showed happy Italian soldiers who had surrendered and are walking with suitcases into captivity. Road looks like a dirt road and it is in a small town.

I think I will use dirt road at least for this map.

[newlife]

The NZ comment was probably about Roman roads on the mainland. The roman empire's success was due in part to the quality of their roads. And where we get "all roads lead to Rome." No clue about Sicily.

[LongLeftFlank]

The key to the multimillenial lifespan of Roman roads is their extraordinarily deep and well-graded roadbeds, which preserve a reasonably level and well-drained surface long after the paving has vanished. Virtually no Roman roads retain their original cobbles, which were mainly stolen for quarry.

It was my understanding that the ring road linking Messina to Palermo via both coasts was the primary paved highway on Sicily; that's the road Patton followed in his high speed drive. I don't think that followed a Roman era route though, except probably for the Messina-Syracuse stretch (east shore). In Roman times, ship was the logical way to get to Palermo.

[Michael Emrys]

It was my understanding that the ring road linking Messina to Palermo via both coasts was the primary paved highway on Sicily; that's the road Patton followed in his high speed drive. I don't think that followed a Roman era route though, except probably for the Messina-Syracuse stretch (east shore). In Roman times, ship was the logical way to get to Palermo.

I think LLF is entirely correct about that.

Sicily was the poorest, most backward part of the country. AFAICT, the mainland folk barely considered it part of the nation. Think of the post-American Civil War South if you have any familiarity with it.

All my readings have been pretty emphatic that the roads of the interior at that time were dirt. Mostly they existed to connect farms and villages to market towns. There was not what we would considered a lot of traffic on them in the normal run of things pre-war, and almost none of it would have been motorized. Ergo, no real need for pavement. In and around the larger towns and cities would be a different matter, and the coast road that LLF mentions was paved. So dirt mostly and in some places gravel. And that should cover most cases.

Michael