The main road arteries of Italy were already developed at the peak of the Roman Empire, with postal stations along them at “best” intervals to support travelers, so you could sustain an almost optimal speed. 8h/day is a reasonable maintainable schedule over long hikes, assuming mostly flat tracks - and that is the case for the Roman roads. Still, would take an optimal month, so likely one and a half months to cross Italy on foot.
The travel speed isn’t really limited by how fast you can walk, but how many of hours of walking you can do. And that comes down to equipment and logistics.
If you have a bed and food waiting, you can travel basically every daylight hour. 8h/day is totally doable. If you have roman feet that spent every day in roman sandals, I’m sure your feet will look just like mine in modern shoes after a day of walking (that is, not great, but also not bloody stumps).
But if you don’t, you need to bring food and water, and those are heavy, so you can’t bring a week’s worth of supplies. You can bring modern sleeping gear on a hike, but that’s not really a thing with a natural fiber tent and wooden poles, so you need to build a camp, and time spent building a camp is time not traveling. You need to cook, which is not trivial if you need to gather wood first, maybe gather water and supplement your rations. That’s more time not traveling. I’ve done reenactment marches (medieval ones, but eh, mostly the same), and the walking is honestly very sustainable. It’s all the work you have to do that slows you down.
Without logistics like roads and sleeping places, the limiting factor isn’t how long YOU can walk, it’s how many hours of walking time there are in a day.
With good logistics, the limiting factor is the distance between rest stops. So basically everyone travels at the same speed, because you can’t really skip one. You also do have to take rest days, because if you destroy your health on a modern hike, you go home feeling like shit and maybe take some medicine. If you do that in 20AD, you die.
Related, I remembering reading a book about logistics in the Crusades, and they pointed out just how much time (and squire/groom manpower) was spent grazing horses each day. Almost as many as the traveling.
Yeah, a horse was basically made to eat constantly, and they need 2% of their bodyweight in dry-mass every day. That’s a LOT of grass, especially since grass is mostly water. And you can’t graze every horse next to the camp, so you need to walk them to a site, and then babysit them.
Of course, if you’re travelling solo, that’s not as much of a problem, since the horse will happily graze while you’re making camp, prepping food, etc etc. If you bring 10.000 friends, finding grass suddenly becomes a huge problem.
The main road arteries of Italy were already developed at the peak of the Roman Empire, with postal stations along them at “best” intervals to support travelers, so you could sustain an almost optimal speed. 8h/day is a reasonable maintainable schedule over long hikes, assuming mostly flat tracks - and that is the case for the Roman roads. Still, would take an optimal month, so likely one and a half months to cross Italy on foot.
I feel like ancient peoples walked a lot more than we do nowadays, so they might have been able to cover more ground than we can.
Admittedly, this is armchair speculation at best.
The travel speed isn’t really limited by how fast you can walk, but how many of hours of walking you can do. And that comes down to equipment and logistics.
If you have a bed and food waiting, you can travel basically every daylight hour. 8h/day is totally doable. If you have roman feet that spent every day in roman sandals, I’m sure your feet will look just like mine in modern shoes after a day of walking (that is, not great, but also not bloody stumps).
But if you don’t, you need to bring food and water, and those are heavy, so you can’t bring a week’s worth of supplies. You can bring modern sleeping gear on a hike, but that’s not really a thing with a natural fiber tent and wooden poles, so you need to build a camp, and time spent building a camp is time not traveling. You need to cook, which is not trivial if you need to gather wood first, maybe gather water and supplement your rations. That’s more time not traveling. I’ve done reenactment marches (medieval ones, but eh, mostly the same), and the walking is honestly very sustainable. It’s all the work you have to do that slows you down.
Without logistics like roads and sleeping places, the limiting factor isn’t how long YOU can walk, it’s how many hours of walking time there are in a day.
With good logistics, the limiting factor is the distance between rest stops. So basically everyone travels at the same speed, because you can’t really skip one. You also do have to take rest days, because if you destroy your health on a modern hike, you go home feeling like shit and maybe take some medicine. If you do that in 20AD, you die.
Related, I remembering reading a book about logistics in the Crusades, and they pointed out just how much time (and squire/groom manpower) was spent grazing horses each day. Almost as many as the traveling.
As Napoleon said, an army marches on its stomach!
Yeah, a horse was basically made to eat constantly, and they need 2% of their bodyweight in dry-mass every day. That’s a LOT of grass, especially since grass is mostly water. And you can’t graze every horse next to the camp, so you need to walk them to a site, and then babysit them.
Of course, if you’re travelling solo, that’s not as much of a problem, since the horse will happily graze while you’re making camp, prepping food, etc etc. If you bring 10.000 friends, finding grass suddenly becomes a huge problem.