Rome and its Spanish Steps: Grandeur, godliness, great art
A tour of Rome might usefully start at the Spanish Steps, which aren’t Spanish at all and appear to underline the grandeur, gestures of godliness, and yes, greatness of the artists in the Eternal City.
As the great cultural critic Robert Hughes wrote in his last book Rome, the Spanish Steps might almost be a marker for the difference between Rome past and present. After the Steps were built in the 18th century, “the great city gradually ceased to be a place from which one could expect major painting or sculpture to emerge,” he writes. Why this happened is hard to say but “cultures do grow old…whole cultures, like individual people, do run down; with age, their energies gutter out. They have a collective life, but that life depends entirely on the renewal of individual talent from decade to decade. The mere fact that they once produced extraordinary things guarantees nothing about their futures—otherwise, one could have expected something memorable from (say) Egypt or Mayan America over the last few hundred years”.
True.
As for the Steps, they are magnificent, “the only great rococo monument in Rome”, according to Hughes.
And spectacularly mis-named. It would be more accurate to call them the French Steps as the French Minims, an order of friars, controlled and supplied the funds to build the staircase. They only got the name “Spanish” because the building at number 50 on the piazza was and is the Spanish Embassy to the Holy See.
That said, as everyone knows, most tourists today have little or no interest in the Spanishness or otherwise of the Spanish Steps.
What they might see, however, is the beauty with which the three-flight stairway connects the floodplain of the Tiber to the streets above, rising from Piazza di Spagna with its Bernini ship-fountain to the Church of Santissima Trinità dei Monti and an obelisk.
Hughes writes that the Spanish Steps, constructed between 1723 and 1726 to the designs of Francesco de Sanctis, are surely the grandest and most spectacular of all staircases in Rome. “The division of the stairway into three major flights and three landings refers to the Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit), after which the church at its summit is named”.
At one go, then, there is grandeur, godliness and great art.
“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life”
– Jack Kerouac
