In ARNAC, travel is approached not only as a problem of route calculation, but also as a human experience shaped by movement, memory, perception, and local knowledge. This part of the project explores how roads were used, experienced, described, and remembered, both in antiquity and in more recent periods. It brings together ancient testimonies, modern travel accounts, embodied field experience, and interviews with local communities in order to understand travelling as a meaningful social and cultural practice. In this sense, roads are studied not simply as lines connecting points on a map, but as lived pathways through which people encountered landscapes, places, and one another.

A particularly important aspect of this work is the comparison between modelled routes and experiential knowledge. Members of the research team walk are curently selecting routes in order to compare digital predictions with actual movement through the terrain, while interviews with local inhabitants help identify older or forgotten paths that survived in memory before modern mechanised transport changed patterns of mobility. The project also considers how ancient and modern travellers wrote about their journeys in Crete, and how such accounts preserve impressions of difficulty, distance, visibility, landscape, and encounter. Through this combination of written testimonies, walking, and local knowledge, ARNAC investigates travel as an embodied and interpretive process that shaped the cultural meaning of the Cretan landscape.