Spanish Steps
Rome's most famous staircase doubles as the city's grandest living room.
The Spanish Steps — 135 travertine steps built between 1723 and 1725 by architect Francesco de Sanctis — cascade down from the Trinità dei Monti church at the top to the Piazza di Spagna at the bottom. They got their name from the nearby Spanish Embassy to the Holy See, though the staircase was actually funded by the French. For nearly three centuries they've been one of Rome's great social magnets: a place to sit, people-watch, and feel the city breathe around you.
The experience is essentially freeform. You climb, you find a step, you sit. At the base is the Barcaccia fountain, a half-submerged boat sculpted by Pietro Bernini (father of the more famous Gian Lorenzo) in 1627 — worth a close look before you head up. In spring the steps are draped in azaleas, a tradition since the 1950s that transforms the whole staircase into a pink and purple cascade. At the top, the twin-towered Trinità dei Monti church rewards those who make the climb, and the view back down over the piazza and the rooftops of central Rome is genuinely arresting. The surrounding neighborhood — the Tridente — is Rome's most glamorous shopping district, with the Via Condotti running directly from the base of the steps toward the Tiber.
Go early in the morning, ideally before 8am, when the steps are nearly empty and the light is soft — this is when they look the way they do in every postcard. Eating and drinking on the steps is now prohibited and enforced with fines, so leave the gelato for elsewhere. The Keats-Shelley House, right on the piazza at the base of the steps, is a small museum tucked into the building where the poet John Keats died in 1821 — easy to miss, but one of Rome's more quietly moving literary shrines.
