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Spanish Steps

Coordinates: 41°54′22″N 12°28′59″E / 41.905990°N 12.483183°E / 41.905990; 12.483183
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The Spanish Steps, seen from Piazza di Spagna. The cream-coloured building to the right is the apartment where John Keats lived, now the Keats-Shelley Memorial House.

The Spanish Steps (Template:Lang-it) are a set of steps in Rome, Italy, climbing a steep slope between the Piazza di Spagna at the base and Piazza Trinità dei Monti, dominated by the Trinità dei Monti church at the top. The Scalinata is the widest staircase in Europe.[1]

The monumental stairway of 138 steps was built with French diplomat Étienne Gueffier’s bequeathed funds of 20,000 scudi, in 1723–1725, linking the Bourbon Spanish Embassy, and the Trinità dei Monti church that was under the patronage of the Bourbon kings of France, both located above — to the Holy See in Palazzo Monaldeschi located below. The stairway was designed by architects Francesco de Sanctis and Alessandro Specchi.

History

The piazza di Spagna in an 18th-century etching by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, seen from south. The street on the left is Via del Babuino, leading to Piazza del Popolo.

Following a competition in 1717 the steps were designed by the little-known Francesco de Sanctis,[2] though Alessandro Specchi was long thought to have produced the winning entry. Generations of heated discussion over how the steep slope to the church on a shoulder of the Pincio should be urbanised preceded the final execution. Archival drawings from the 1580s show that Pope Gregory XIII was interested in constructing a stair to the recently completed façade of the French church. Gaspar van Wittel's view of the wooded slope in 1683, before the Scalinata was built, is conserved in the Galleria Nazionale, Rome.[3] The Roman-educated Cardinal Mazarin took a personal interest in the project that had been stipulated in Gueffier's will and entrusted it to his agent in Rome, whose plan included an equestrian monument of Louis XIV, an ambitious intrusion that created a furore in papal Rome. Mazarin died in 1661, the pope in 1667, and Gueffier's will was successfully contested by a nephew who claimed half; so the project lay dormant until Pope Clement XI Albani renewed interest in it. The Bourbon fleur-de-lys and Innocent XIII's eagle and crown are carefully balanced in the sculptural details. The solution is a gigantic inflation of some conventions of terraced garden stairs.[4] The Spanish Steps, which Joseph de Lalande[5] and Charles de Brosses noted were already in poor condition,[6] have been restored several times, most recently in 1995.

Piazza di Spagna

Fontana della Barcaccia, seen from the top of the Spanish Steps. The narrow Via Condotti, home to many of Rome's designer shops, runs up the picture.

In the Piazza di Spagna at the base is the Early Baroque fountain called Fontana della Barcaccia ("Fountain of the Old Boat"), built in 1627-29 and often credited to Pietro Bernini, father of a more famous son, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who is recently said to have collaborated on the decoration. The elder Bernini had been the pope's architect for the Acqua Vergine, since 1623. According to an unlikely legend, Pope Urban VIII had the fountain installed after he had been impressed by a boat brought here by a flood of the Tiber river.

In the piazza, at the corner on the right as one begins to climb the steps, is the house where English poet John Keats lived and died in 1821; it is now a museum dedicated to his memory, full of memorabilia of the English Romantic generation. On the same right side stands the 15th century former cardinal Lorenzo Cybo de Mari's palace, now Ferrari di Valbona, a building altered in 1936 to designs by Marcello Piacentini, the main city planner during Fascism, with modern terraces perfectly in harmony with the surrounding baroque context.

With its characteristic butterfly plan, the Piazza di Spagna is one of the most famous images in the world, as well as being one of the most majestic urban monuments of Roman Baroque style. In the Renaissance period, the square was the most popular tourist attraction in the city: it attracted artists and writers alike and was full of elegant hotels, inns and residences.

At the end of the seventeenth century, it was called Trinità dei Monti, after the church that dominates the square from above, but it was later given the name we know today after the Spanish Ambassador who lived there.

At the foot of the stairs, you will find the famous Barcaccia Fountain, the work of Pietro Bernini and his son, Gian Lorenzo. The latter went on to become the creator of some of the most important masterpieces of Baroque art in the city, including the renowned baldachino of St. Peter's Basilica. With its characteristic form of a sinking ship, the fountain recalls the historic flood of the River Tiber in 1598 and refers to a folk legend whereby a fishing boat carried away by the flood of the river was found at this exact spot. In reality, the sinking boat was ably invented by Bernini to overcome a technical problem due to low water pressure. The sun and bee ornamentation is a symbol of the Barberini family and a reference to Pope Urban VIII who commissioned the work. However, the main attraction of the square has to be the spectacular staircase of Trinità dei Monti.

Built on the request of Innocent XII and created by Francesco De Sanctis in the eighteenth century, this daring architectural feat with its ramps and stairs that intersect and open out like a fan definitively provided a solution for connecting the square and the Trinità Church above, providing the city with a particularly intriguing attraction that is adored by tourists from all over the world. The sight of the square in spring should not be missed, when the ramps of the staircase are literally covered with flowers and the architecture is playfully lost beneath a magnificent array of colour.

Uses

At the top the Viale ramps up the Pincio which is the Pincian Hill, omitted, like the Janiculum, from the classic Seven hills of Rome. From the top of the steps the Villa Medici can be reached.

The Spanish Steps, as seen from the Fontana della Barcaccia in the Piazza di Spagna, at dusk on a summer's eve.

During Christmas time a 19th-century crib is displayed on the first landing of the staircase. During May, part of the steps are covered by pots of azaleas. In modern times the Spanish Steps have included a small cut-flower market. The steps are not a place for eating lunch, being forbidden by Roman urban regulations, but they are usually crowded with people.

In media

The 1953 film Roman Holiday, starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck, made the Spanish Steps famous to an American audience.

The apartment that was the setting for The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone (1961) is halfway up on the right. Bernardo Bertolucci's Besieged (1998) is also set in a house next to the steps.

The Bob Dylan song "When I Paint My Masterpiece," first recorded in 1971 by The Band and later appearing on the album "Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II," mentions both the "Spanish Stairs" and the Colosseum. Norwegian singer/songwriter Morten Harket, from A-ha, released a song called "Spanish Steps" on his album Wild Seed in 1995.

On 16 January, 2008, Italian artist, Graziano Cecchini, covered the steps with hundreds of thousands of multicolored plastic balls. He claimed that it was done to make the world notice the situation of the Karen people in Myanmar,[7] and as a protest against the conditions of artists in Italy.[8]

On 9 November 2009, a mulit-media event was held on the steps to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; the event included the erection of replicas of parts of the wall.

Local landmarks

Notes

  1. ^ Boyer Gillies, Linda (February 1972). "An Eighteenth-Century Roman View Panini's Scalinata della Trinità dei Monti". The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin. 30 (4): 176–184. doi:10.2307/3258528. JSTOR 3258528.
  2. ^ Little is known of this architect, who was favoured by the French in the design process. De Sanctis' drawing was engraved by Girolamo Rossi in 1726ghgclolololololv hvc hgcith a long dedication to Louis XV. (Gillies 1972:181f).
  3. ^ Gillies 1972:181 and van Wittel's tempera, fig 3.
  4. ^ The first such divided and symmetrical stairs were devised for the Belvedere Courtyard by Donato Bramante. Shaped and angled steps were introduced by Michelangelo in the vestibule to the Laurentian Library.
  5. ^ Lalande, Voyage d'un français en Italie (1769)
  6. ^ Gillies 1972:182
  7. ^ Officials unamused by Rome stunt
  8. ^ New York Times Coverage on the coloured ball cascade

References

  • Ferrari di Valbona, Carlo Alberto (1965). I viventi diritti dell’Italia a palazzo Farnese alla scalinata ed alla Trinità dei Monti in Roma. Rome: Edizioni d’Arte.
  • Pecchiai, Pio (1958). "Regesti dei documenti patrimoniali del Convento Romano della Trinità dei Monti". Archivi (25): 406–423.
  • Rendina, Claudio (2000). Enciclopedia di Roma. Rome: Newton Compton.
  • Salerno, Luigi (1967). Piazza di Spagna. Naples.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Trinità dei Monti (Rome) - Scalinata and Piazza di Spagna (Roma).

41°54′22″N 12°28′59″E / 41.905990°N 12.483183°E / 41.905990; 12.483183

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