Here is some handsome lettering from ruins at the ancient port city of Ostia, west of Rome. I don’t know what period this fragment dates to, although the age of Hadrian always seems to be a good guess.
For comparison, here’s a sample of the typeface Trajan (the movie font!), designed in 1989 by Carol Twombly for Adobe based on inscriptions on Trajan’s column in Rome. They might just be the effect of the centuries, but I prefer the softer serifs of the inscribed letters in the photo. I also like their less regular vertical axes.
