Parts of Italy’s Appian Way Are Left Off World Heritage List. Cue Grievances.

When Maria Innamorato heard last month that the Via Appia — known in English as the Appian Way — had been added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List, she rejoiced.

Ms. Innamorato, the deputy mayor of the town of Cisterna di Latina, Italy, felt the months of effort to craft a dossier detailing her town’s bona fides had finally paid off. But the joy was short-lived.

Later that same day, city officials were told that Cisterna, which is near Rome and is sliced in two by the modern iteration of the ancient road, was along one of the sections of the Appia that UNESCO experts had excluded from the heritage list.

Ms. Innamorato was stunned, as were officials from other towns that were shut out. “We still don’t really know why we were left off,” she said.

In all, three sections of the road, considered by many the world’s first highway, were passed over by experts for the International Council on Monuments and Sites, which evaluates candidates for the heritage list. The towns’ hopes of becoming new magnets for tourists, and their much-needed money, vanished.

Local officials whose towns lie along the road say their own national officials have let them down as well. Gennaro Sangiuliano, Italy’s culture minister, publicly acknowledged that Italy did not object to the decision to leave out some parts of the road. He and other officials feared any delay would have led to the country losing its bragging rights for having the most World Heritage sites.

By adding the Appia, Italy managed to stay just ahead of China, which also had another site listed this year. China now has 59 sites to Italy’s 60.

Beating out China “is something all Italians can be proud of,” Mr. Sangiuliano said during the celebration of the World Heritage designation last month. “This is a primacy that comes from our history, and it is something that we have to safeguard.”

Critics in the excluded sections of the Appia grumbled that the Culture Ministry was not respecting history, but instead sold out to beat the Chinese at the heritage game.

“We will oppose this with every means at our disposal, every means possible to vindicate our right to belong,” the mayor of Cisterna, Valentino Mantini, said.

Experts from the International Council on Monuments and Sites declined to respond to a request for clarification on their reasoning. But in adding the Appia to the list in July, a council’s representative said that the two excluded sections closest to Rome, which include Cisterna, had been left out because they included sites that were located on spurs just off the roadway instead of on the main road.

The shunned Italians huffed that such a ruling showed a basic lack of understanding of the beauty of highway networks.

Two of the excluded sections are in Lazio, the region that includes Rome; one is in Puglia, Italy’s heel.

Known as the “regina viarum,” or the queen of roads, the Appia was built by the Romans starting in 312 B.C. to allow them to move efficiently and to conquer the south of what is modern-day Italy.

Finished about 400 years later and extending to Brindisi, the road became an important trade route and an example of the excellence of Roman engineering. Many sections are still used today, running through fields, sheep tracks and towns.

Some sections still have the original ancient cobblestones. Others have been paved over, including a long, straight tract of road, about 25 pine-tree-lined miles that run from near Cisterna to the coast, that was used to break 20th century speed records.

For Cisterna, there was much more on the line than getting recognition from UNESCO. While so much of Italy is feeling overwhelmed by tourists — think Venice and the Cinque Terre — Cisterna is desperate for visitors. Making it to the World Heritage List was going to be the town’s ticket to revival.

Cisterna had been on a downward spiral in the decades before World War II, losing much of its political clout when Mussolini’s Fascist regime built a series of new towns in the drained Pontine Marshes. The towns jockeyed with Cisterna, which for centuries had been the only town for many miles.

Then, in 1944, Allied bombings and raids destroyed most of the city. The one historic palazzo that was spared now serves as Cisterna’s prized cultural hub, with a library, exhibition space and a room for ceremonies, civil weddings and the occasional concert.

For a city with little left, the Appia came to serve as an anchor to its past and a steppingstone for its future, said Danilo Di Camillo, the municipal worker in charge of culture.

Angela Maria Ferroni, a now retired Culture Ministry official who is widely touted as having masterminded Italy’s Appia bid, said other World Heritage sites like Venice or Pompeii attract “millions of visitors” regardless of the UNESCO imprimatur. But for neglected towns along the Appia, she said, a nod from the experts would have been “an important starting point” for their development.

In the UNESCO bid, Cisterna city officials showcased a local site first excavated in the 1990s: a road station that is cited in the Acts of the Apostles as the place where St. Paul had met some Christians from Rome on his travels to the city.

Local officials still hope that a previous plan to create a walking path along the Appia will come together. The Culture Ministry would like to replicate the success of the Camino de Santiago, which each year attracts tens of thousands of pilgrims and tourists who walk along routes that lead to the burial site of St. James the Great in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

Some 20 million euros were allocated toward the project, which has been bogged down by administrative setbacks. “Unfortunately, the hearsay about Italian bureaucracy exists,” said Luigi Scaroina, the Culture Ministry official in charge of the project. Securing paths where car traffic is heavy is also a concern, he said.

For those along the parts of the road that did win the UNESCO designation, there is optimism that the road will now be better recognized for the cultural treasure it is. Simone Quilici, director of the Appia Antica Archaeological Park, the curated cypress- and umbrella pine-lined segment of the road that begins in central Rome, noted that even this well-known portion of roadway gets only about 60,000 visitors a year, compared with the 12 million who visited the Colosseum last year.

At the Appia celebration, Mr. Sangiuliano, the culture minister, said he was certain that the omission of the three sections of road was “an easily resolvable problem” and pledged to “remedy” the situation. But that could take time because there is only one meeting a year to decide which sites will be inscribed on the World Heritage List. Regardless, when it comes to future decision-making by the Italian government, he said, local officials of the excluded areas will be treated as equals of those whose areas have been included in the site.

Mr. Mantini, the mayor, was only partly appeased. “I want the minister to send me a draft of the commemorative plaque I should put at the entrance of my city,” he said. “Should I write ‘Excluded,’ or ‘It’s there, but we can’t say it is’? Or ‘Part of the Appia patrimony of humanity’ or not?”