A road on an ESE/WNW alignment cut into the tufa bed rock and its drainage channel came to light during rescue excavations ordered by the Superintendency. The channel conveyed and diverted surface water so that it did not collect on the road surface immediately below it and make the road difficult to use. A second channel found uphill from the first provided a first barrier to the hill wash. However, as it was dug into vegetation covered terrain and only in minimal part cut into the bed rock (the cut was circa 0.10 m deep), it would not have provided the desired level of drainage. No archaeological material was present within the fill of either channels. The excavated trenches showed that the road had at least six phases of use. 1. The oldest cart tracks were identified in the WNW area; they were very deep with respect to the bed rock surface (-0.55 m) at a point where the bed rock was at its maximum incline but was least solid – hence the necessity to conserve it from the effects of hill wash using drainage channels placed up hill. The cart tracks gave an axle measurement of 1.42 m. The width of the ruts themselves varied between 16 cm, in the lower stretch, and 10 cm further uphill. 2. The depth reached by the first cart tracks must have made it necessary to raise the road bed using dumps of tufaceous material. 3. The new level also showed wheel ruts both in the WNW tract and in that further uphill. The limestone block placed as a wayside post along the south-western edge of the road, up against which the cart track was clearly visible. 4. Another channel was dug on the NE side of the road perhaps due to the problems caused by hill wash along the slope at the foot of which it lay. It was less accurately dug than the first two sometime after the abandonment of the road itself. 5. The lower tract of the third channel was investigated and a fragment of black glaze pottery was found in the more or less natural fill. 6. The archaeological surface showed the plough marks, running in a south-east/north-west direction, from relatively recent agricultural work. The road and related structures easily fit into the rural landscape of Rome’s south-eastern suburbium. Considering the alignment and depth of the earliest wheel ruts, which attest the road’s heavy use, it is thought that the road may have functioned as a link between the main road network (n. 55s on sheet 26N of the Carta dell’Agro, and the fossa of Tor di Bella Monaca. The organised drainage system represents a technical expedient in use on medium-sized land holdings connected to the organisation of villas and farms in a period which we can date to the middle Republic on the basis of the materials found and ancient topography of the area. Such systems disappeared with the establishment of the latifundia at the end of the 1st century A.D.