Spanish Steps

The name is a lie, or at least a misdirection. These steps are not Spanish. They were funded by a French diplomat, Etienne Gueffier, designed by Italian architects Francesco de Sanctis and Alessandro Specchi, and connect an Italian piazza to a French church — the Trinita dei Monti at the top. The "Spanish" part comes from the Spanish Embassy to the Holy See, which has been located in the piazza below since the seventeenth century. For a while, the Spanish government claimed the entire area as sovereign territory and would arrest non-Spaniards who wandered through. The French were furious about this, which is part of why they funded the steps — to assert their own presence.

There are one hundred and thirty-five steps, built between 1723 and 1725, and they were designed to be theatrical. The Baroque staircase widens and narrows, splits and reunites, creating a sense of drama that makes simply walking up them feel like a performance. This was deliberate: Rome in the eighteenth century was a city obsessed with spectacle, and the steps were always intended as a stage for the passeggiata, the evening stroll.

John Keats died in a small apartment at the base of these steps in 1821. He was twenty-five. The room is now a museum, preserved almost exactly as it was, though every piece of furniture in it is a reproduction — the originals were burned after his death, as was the standard practice for rooms where someone died of tuberculosis. His last words were reportedly "I can feel the flowers growing over me." The apartment next door is where Percy Bysshe Shelley once stayed.

Since 2019, you can no longer sit on the steps. The Rome city council banned it, with fines of up to four hundred euros. This was a genuinely controversial decision — Romans and tourists had been sitting on these steps for three hundred years, and the passeggiata tradition kind of depends on pausing to people-watch. But the travertine was getting damaged, so now you walk up, you walk down, and you keep moving.