Apologies for my long winded title. I am conducting research on medieval trade, and have found several answers as to where the Silk Road ended in the West (Constantinople, Antioch, Venice, Rome, etc.). Increasingly, it seems that the term 'Silk Road' encompasses a variety of trading networks, and thus has not concrete start or end. If the Silk Road did have a concrete starting/ending point in the West, where was it , and what qualified it as a starting or ending point as opposed to other Western trading hubs?
The long and short of it is that 'Silk Road' is a post-hoc construction tied in first with Orientalist scholarship and more recently with twinges of Chinese nationalism. To speak of a start or end point to the 'Silk Road' is to ignore that the trans-Eurasian movement of goods, people, and ideas was the emergent result of local trade links, not a deliberately constructed trade network recognised as such. These past answers of mine go into this in more detail: