Spanish Steps

Where it sits. The Spanish Steps climb from Piazza di Spagna to the twin-towered church of Trinità dei Monti on the slope of the Pincian hill, in the heart of Rome's luxury shopping district. The Italian name, Scalinata di Trinità dei Monti, refers to the church; the English name comes from the square below, which has housed the Spanish embassy to the Holy See since the seventeenth century. Via dei Condotti runs west from the foot of the stairs in a dead-straight line, so from the top the view runs down the steps, across the piazza and along a corridor of shopfronts. The stairway has 135 steps arranged in three flights that swell and contract as they rise, with two lateral ramps and a broad terrace roughly halfway up.

The story behind it. For most of the seventeenth century the slope was an awkward wooded bank between the French-owned church above and the Spanish-influenced square below, and diplomatic friction stalled every scheme to build on it. The money finally came from a bequest left by a French diplomat, Étienne Gueffier, who died in 1660. Construction ran from 1723 to 1725 to a design by Francesco de Sanctis, who beat a competing proposal from Alessandro Specchi. De Sanctis solved the diplomatic problem by decorating the balustrades with emblems that could be read as French or papal rather than as either crown's property. The obelisk in front of the church, a Roman imitation of an Egyptian original, was raised in 1789. The church itself was begun in 1502 under French patronage and consecrated in 1585.

The fountain at the bottom. The Fontana della Barcaccia — the ugly boat — was built between 1627 and 1629 for Urban VIII and is generally credited to Pietro Bernini, probably with help from his young son Gian Lorenzo. It sits half-sunk below pavement level, a design forced on the sculptor by the feeble pressure of the Acqua Vergine that feeds it; a popular story instead attributes the shape to a barge stranded here by the Tiber flood of 1598. In February 2015 visiting football supporters chipped the rim in dozens of places, damage that required months of restoration and helped push the city towards its current strict conduct rules.

On screen. William Wyler's Roman Holiday (1953) is the reason the stairway is on most film-location itineraries. Princess Ann, played by Audrey Hepburn, sits on the steps eating gelato, and Joe Bradley, played by Gregory Peck, contrives to meet her there among the flower stalls. The production is historically significant in its own right: it was shot on location across Rome, at a time when major American features were normally built inside studios, with interiors completed at Cinecittà. The steps and the surrounding square also appear in Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), which used Piazza di Spagna and the streets around Via dei Condotti for its Rome sequences. A modern crew cannot restage the Hepburn scene: sitting on the steps has been banned since August 2019 and carries a fine, so tributes are shot standing, or in the piazza below.

Around the base. The Keats–Shelley House occupies the corner building at the right of the stairs, where the poet John Keats died of tuberculosis in February 1821 at the age of twenty-five; it has been a museum since 1909 and preserves his rooms and a substantial Romantic library. On the opposite corner, Babington's Tea Rooms has been serving English tea since 1893. Via dei Condotti holds Antico Caffè Greco, open since 1760 and a haunt of Goethe, Byron and Stendhal, alongside the flagship stores of the Italian fashion houses. Each spring, usually from mid-April, the city banks the lower flights with hundreds of pots of azaleas, which is the one time of year the stairway is worth photographing in colour.

Practical detail and timing. Spagna station on Metro Line A opens directly beside the piazza, and a lift inside the station rises to the Pincio terrace near Villa Borghese, which is the only step-free way to reach the top. The stairway is public, unticketed and open at all hours. Crowds are dense from mid-morning until late evening; early light before 08:00 gives clean sightlines up the steps and warm colour on the church towers. The steps face roughly west, so the sunset light falls on the façade of Trinità dei Monti rather than on the climb itself. Bulgari funded the last full restoration, completed in 2016, which returned the travertine to a pale, even tone after decades of grime.