All roads

In 312 BC the censor Appius Claudius Caecus began a road south from Rome. It ran 212 kilometers to Capua, in Campania, and by about 244 BC it had been pushed another 370 kilometers to the port of Brundisium, on the heel of Italy. It became the first and most famous of Rome’s great roads, and it still carries his name: the Via Appia.¹

Romans measured those roads in miles, and a mile was a count of steps: mille passus, a thousand paces, each pace a double step. In modern terms it came to about 1,480 meters. Every mile, a stone column called a miliarium marked the distance.²

In 20 BC Augustus, then in charge of the roads as curator viarum, set up a milestone of his own in the Forum, near the Temple of Saturn. Sheathed in gilded bronze, it became known as the Golden Milestone, and distances across the empire were reckoned from it. Its exact location has since been lost.³

How many roads did Rome actually build? In 2025 a team of archaeologists published Itiner-e, a dataset of the empire’s roads as they stood around AD 150. It counts 299,171 kilometers of road, up from a previous total of 188,555. The authors are candid about the limits: the precise course of only about 2.7 percent of those roads is known with certainty.⁴⁵

Only one large map of the Roman road network survives, and only as a copy. The Tabula Peutingeriana is a parchment scroll about 6.75 meters long and 35 centimeters tall, made around the year 1200 from a late antique original that was last revised in the fourth or early fifth century. It shows roads, the stations along them, and the distances between, with some 555 cities and 3,500 other places.⁶⁷

Alongside maps, Romans kept itineraries: lists of the stations along a road and the distances between them. The best known, the Antonine Itinerary, covers roads across the empire and seems to draw on official records, though its exact date is uncertain.⁹

The roads ran out from the Forum, and so did the letters. The inscription at the top of this page was cut into the base of Trajan’s Column, which was dedicated in May of AD 113. It has served as the model for Roman capital letters ever since, and Carol Twombly’s typeface Trajan, for Adobe, was drawn directly from it.¹⁰¹¹

Atlas Serif isn’t a Roman capital. It’s a slab serif, built for screens and signs. But setting that inscription in it is a reminder of how far back the serif goes, and how long letters and roads have shared the same stone.