During the three years spent at the École Française de Rome (1878-1881), M.-R. de La Blanchère devoted himself to the analysis, reconstruction and interpretation of the ancient landscape of the Latium region between Velletri and Terracina, the Lepini Mountains and the Tyrrhenian Sea, a region in which the Via Appia was identified as the main historical and archaeological element of its evolution, from the antiquity to the contemporary age. In the whole of the research about southern Latium – and in particular in the unfinished work on the Via Appia and the Pontine Lands – La Blanchère shows an extraordinary attitude to identify innovative historical and archaeological problems. However, compared to the subsequent scientific production, the La Blanchère's studies are characterized not only by the breadth of the disciplinary vision (geography, demography, topography, archeology, epigraphy, history) and for the diachronic cut (from the Antiquity to the Middle Ages, up to the modern and contemporary ages) but also for the innovative attention to the relationship between the man and the environment, for the historical interpretation in socio-economic terms of the transformations of the cities and of the ancient landscapes, for the constant projection of those processes in the observation and in the evaluation of the present.