This was surprisingly underwhelming. Also I can 100% guarantee you that you will not travel across the alps in the same amount of time in January as you would in July despite this page suggesting you will, so quite frankly I don't see what the season selection even does. For example Penne Locos to Augusta Praetoria leads over the great St Bernard Pass (yes where the dogs come from) has an elevation of about 2400m over sea level and in January an average temperature of -7°C and a couple of meters of snow covering it.
The level of detail enabled by technology is always remarkable. Check out figure 15 in the geospatial section "restricted sea zones based on wave height." The diligence to create something like this is laudable as well.
I've always been fond of the sheer nerdiness of http://www.avespfade.de, a route planner for the German fantasy RPG "Das Schwarze Auge" (The Dark Eye).
That user interface is quite historic too. It’s not ancient but it’s like Web 2.0. Doesn’t quite work on my phone.
One question is, does it show where all the pirates and robbers are? Where and when storms are likely? Shipwrecks? This is the sort of local knowledge that is usually lost. Suetonius says Augustus led his fleet into many storms and lost a lot of ships. Sounds like the type of guy who relied on a map and not the advice of experienced sailors.
Isn't it really interesting that news would take weeks or months to traverse the whole of the Roman empire? Novel information is still not uniformly distributed in our era, but thinking to back then, even news of a new emperor or something did not happen automatically. You could have a departing army coming across a retreating army, or something like that.
Not even back then. It was only 150 years ago that the transcontinental telegraph allowed messages to pass from one side of America to another in hours rather than a "couldn't be done" 10 days for the Pony Express. in the 1856 election it took weeks or even months for the news of the new president to reach across the country.
