Spanish Steps

Archival drawings from the 1580s show Pope Gregory XIII interested in building a stair up to the recently completed facade of the French church of Trinità dei Monti, on a shoulder of the Pincio some 29 metres above the square below, and generations of heated debate over how that steep slope should be urbanised followed. Étienne Gueffier, French diplomat to the Holy See, died in 1660 leaving part of his fortune for the construction of the stairs, and the Roman-educated Cardinal Mazarin took a personal interest, entrusting the project to his agent in Rome. The agent's plan included an equestrian monument to Louis XIV of France, an intrusion that created a furore in papal Rome.

Mazarin died in 1661 and the pope in 1667; Gueffier's will was successfully contested by a nephew who claimed half, and the project lay dormant until Pope Clement XI Albani renewed interest in it early in the eighteenth century. A competition held in 1717 was won by Francesco de Sanctis, an architect of whom little is known and who was favoured by the French during the design process, though Alessandro Specchi was long thought to have produced the winning entry.

The commission is credited to Cardinal Pierre Guérin de Tencin, with French funding flowing from 1721 to link the square with the church the French crown held in patronage. Benedict XIII inaugurated the monumental stairway during the Jubilee of 1725. It tied the Trinità dei Monti church at the top, under the patronage of the Bourbon kings of France, to the Spanish Embassy to the Holy See in the Palazzo Monaldeschi at its foot.

De Sanctis's solution was a gigantic inflation of some conventions of terraced garden stairs: the divided, symmetrical form devised for the Belvedere Courtyard by Donato Bramante, and the shaped, angled steps Michelangelo introduced in the vestibule of the Laurentian Library. The sculptural detail carried the Bourbon fleur-de-lys and Innocent XIII's eagle and crown in careful balance. De Sanctis's drawing was engraved by Girolamo Rossi in 1726, with a long dedication to Louis XV.

The square at the base takes its name from the Palazzo di Spagna, seat of the Spanish embassy to the Holy See since 1622. Its Early Baroque fountain, the Fontana della Barcaccia, was built in 1627–29 and is usually credited to Pietro Bernini, with his son Gian Lorenzo more recently said to have collaborated on the decoration. At the right-hand corner as the climb begins stands the house where the English poet John Keats lived and died in 1821, now a museum of his memory; at the other corner the Babington's tea room opened in 1893.

The mid-eighteenth-century writers Joseph de Lalande and Charles de Brosses both noted that the steps were already in poor condition, and they were restored several times since, including a campaign that ran from May to December 1995. A further renovation sponsored by the Italian luxury house Bulgari, whose Italian flagship store stands on the nearby Via dei Condotti, began on 8 October 2015, and the steps reopened to the public on 21 September 2016. Work on roughly 3,000 square metres of travertine, brick, marble and plaster employed more than eighty people and cost €1.5 million.

A nineteenth-century manger is set out on the first landing at Christmas, and just before the anniversary of Rome's foundation on 21 April pots of azaleas cover part of the flights, staying until early May. Successive city administrations banned loitering and eating without enforcing the ordinances; in July 2019 Mayor Virginia Raggi's administration introduced stricter rules meant to "guarantee decorum, security and legality", with fines of €250 for sitting down and up to €400 for dirtying or damaging the stone.

In May 2022 a Saudi national drove a rented Maserati down the first flight and fled, was identified from surveillance cameras and arrested at Milan Malpensa Airport, and was charged with inflicting aggravated damage to cultural heritage and monuments; fractures were found on the sixteenth and twenty-ninth steps of the right-hand flight. That June two American tourists launched a scooter down the steps three times, dislodging a ten-centimetre piece of marble that cost €25,000 to repair; they were fined €400 each and banned from the vicinity for two days. In June 2025 a man in his eighties drove a Mercedes halfway down before becoming stuck, firefighters lifted the car away by crane, and the steps were closed while archaeologists inspected them for damage.