Via Claudia Augusta

The western branch left the Po at Hostilia at Ostiglia and ran north to Tridentum. The eastern one began at Altinum, a port on the edge of the Venetian lagoon. It climbed through Opitergium at Oderzo and Feltria at Feltre before turning west to the same city. The two surviving milestones disagree about where the road began: the stone from Cesiomaggiore, near Feltre, counts 350 Roman miles from Altinum to the Danube, while the one from Rabland measures from the Po.

North of Trento the line followed the Adige past Pons Drusi in the Bolzano area and up the Val Venosta to the Reschen Pass. It came down the Inn towards Landeck, crossed the Fern Pass at 1,212 metres and reached Foetes at Füssen, where the Lech leaves the mountains.

On the Bavarian plain it kept to the Lech, passing Abodiacum at Epfach on the way to Augusta Vindelicum, the chief town of the province of Raetia. The survey also draws a spur west to Cambodunum at Kempten. Beyond Augsburg a last stretch probably ran on to the Danube near Mertingen, where it met the military road along the frontier.

Much of the line is still a road, because in the narrow Alpine valleys there is room for only one. In Italy the SS12 and the Brenner motorway share the Adige valley from Trento to Bolzano; the SS38 and SS40 carry on up the Val Venosta to the Reschen Pass. In Austria the B180 descends from Nauders through the Inn gorge towards Landeck and the B179 crosses the Fern Pass to Reutte. In Bavaria the B17, the southern end of the Romantic Road, runs from Füssen through Schongau and Landsberg to Augsburg, largely in the same corridor as the Roman line. These are valley routes rather than Roman surveying: modern engineers have tunnelled and straightened where the Romans climbed. The original roadbed usually lies beside the asphalt or under a farm track.

The best piece of the road itself crosses the moor between Lermoos and Biberwier, below the Fern Pass. A timber causeway runs almost straight across the bog for about a kilometre and a half; excavations between 1992 and 1995 dated its logs to the winter of AD 45 to 46. The raised embankment still shows plainly in the fields. At Fließ, above the Inn near Landeck, the Via Claudia Augusta documentation centre displays the Tyrolean finds alongside a copy of the Tabula Peutingeriana.

In South Tyrol a copy of the Rabland milestone stands outside the Hanswirt inn at Rablà, near Merano; the original, found in 1552, is in the civic museum at Bolzano. At Kempten the Archäologischer Park Cambodunum shows the excavated temple precinct and baths of the Roman town.