The first part of my WIP novel “The Hands of Time”, takes place in the Roman Empire during the 3rd Century.
As always, when doing any writing (especially Historical Fiction), it is important to do sufficient research to make your work believable. There is no point in assuming that your characters can get from one place to another using modern transport.
For this part of the story, I needed to get my characters from Rome to Zaragoza in Spain (or, as it was called back then, ‘Caesaraugusta‘ – we will look at the difficulties associated with proper names in another post).
It might be surprising to know that this isn’t as difficult as it sounds. There is ample evidence of the Roman road network, and this is the basis for planning the journey.
I decided to make a picture to make the journey real, at least to me. After looking around, I found that Wonderdraft would do everything I wanted.
The image at the top of this post is the result – as far as possible it is an accurate representation of Spain and Rome in the 3rd Century, and helps me to visualise the journey that my characters must undertake. Plus, it was fun 😉