d
around Naples, and, as might be expected, in Sicily.

In Austria the roads are very variable as to surface and maintenance,
and there are numerous culverts or _canivaux_ across them. There are
21,112 kilometres of national roads, 66,747 kilometres of provincial
roads, and 87,859 of local roads. They average fourteen kilometres to
the kilometre _carre_.

The history of the development of the modern roadway is too big a
subject to permit of its being treated here; suffice it to recall
that in England and France, and along the Rhine, the lines of the
twentieth-century main roads follow the Roman roads of classic times.

In France, Lyons, in the mid-Rhone valley, was a great centre for the
radiating roadways of Gaul. Strategically it was important then as it
is important now, and Roman soldiery of the past, as the automobilist
of to-day, had here four great thoroughfares leading from the city.
The first traversed the valleys of the Rhine and the Meuse; the
second passed by Autun, Troyes, Chalons, Reims, Soissons, Noyon, and
Amiens; the third branched in one direction toward Saintes, and in
another to Bordeaux; while the fourth dropped down the Rhone valley
direct to Marseilles.

More than thirty thousand kilometres of roadways were in use
throughout Gaul during the Roman occupation, of which the four great
routes _(viae publicae)_ formed perhaps four thousand.

Of the great highways of France, the _Grandes Routes Nationales_, of
which all travellers by road have the fondest and most vivid
memories, it is well to recall that they were furthered, if not
fathered, by none other than Napoleon, who, for all he laid waste,
set up institutions anew which more than compensated for the
destructions.

The great roadways of France, such as the Route de Bretagne, running
due west from the capital, and those leading to Spain, Switzerland,
Italy, and the Pays Bas, had their origin in the days of
Philippe-Auguste. His predecessors had let the magnificently traced
itineraries of the Romans languish and become covered with grass--if
not actually timber-grown.

The arrangement and classification laid down by Philippe-Auguste have
never been changed, simply modified and renamed; thus the _Routes
Royales_--such as followed nearly a straight line from Paris by the
right bank of the Loire to Amboise and to Nantes--became the _Routes
Nationales_ of to-day.

Soon wheeled traffic became a thing to be considered, and royal
corteges mov