Italian travel Articles By Jane Maripose

Piazza di Spagna

In the Piazza at the base is the Early Baroque fountain called Fontana della Barcaccia (“Fountain of the Old Boat”), built in 1627-29 and often credited to Pietro Bernini, father of a more famous son, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who is recently said to have collaborated on the decoration. The elder Bernini had been the pope’s architect for the Acqua Vergine, since 1623. According to an unlikely legend, Pope Urban VIII had the fountain installed after he had been impressed by a boat brought here by a flood of the Tiber river.

Fontana della Barcaccia, seen from the top of the Spanish Steps. The narrow Via Condotti, home to many of Rome’s designer shops, runs up the picture.

In the piazza, at the corner on the right as one begins to climb the steps, is the house where English poet John Keats lived and died in 1821; it is now a museum dedicated to his memory, full of memorabilia of the English Romantic generation. On the same right side stands the 15th century former cardinal Lorenzo Cybo de Mari’s palace, now Ferrari di Valbona, a building altered in 1936 to designs by Marcello Piacentini, the main city planner during Fascism, with modern terraces perfectly in harmony with the surrounding baroque context.

At the top the Viale ramps up the Pincio which is the Pincian Hill, omitted, like the Janiculum, from the classic Seven hills of Rome. From the top of the steps the Villa Medici can be reached.

Spanish Steps

The piazza di Spagna in an 18th century etching by Giuseppe Vasi, seen from south. The street on the left is Via del Babuino, leading to Piazza del Popolo.

The Spanish Steps (Italian: Scalinata della Trinità dei Monti) are a set of steps in Rome, Italy, climbing a steep slope between the Piazza di Spagna at the base and Piazza Trinità dei Monti, dominated by the church of Trinità dei Monti. The Scalinata is the longest and widest staircase in Europe.

The monumental stairway of 138 steps was built with French diplomat Étienne Gueffier’s bequeathed funds of 20,000 scudi, in 1723–1725, linking the Bourbon Spanish Embassy to the Holy See, today still located in Palazzo Monaldeschi in the piazza below, with the Trinità dei Monti above.

Design and building

Following a competition in 1717 the steps were designed by the little-known Francesco de Sanctis, though Alessandro Specchi was long thought to have produced the winning entry. Generations of heated discussion over how the steep slope to the church on a shoulder of the Pincio should be urbanized preceded the final execution. Archival drawings from the 1580s show that Pope Gregory XIII was interested in constructing a stair to the recently-completed façade of the French church. Gaspar van Wittel’s view of the wooded slope in 1683, before the Scalinata was built, is conserved in the Galleria Nazionale, Rome. The Roman-educated Cardinal Mazarin took a personal interest in the project that had been in Gueffier’s will and entrusted it to his agent in Rome, whose plan included an equestrian monument of Louis XIV, an ambitious intrusion that created a furore in papal Rome. Mazarin died in 1661, the pope in 1667, and Gueffier’s will was successfully contested by a nephew who claimed half; so the project lay dormant until Pope Clement XI Albani renewed interest in it. The Bourbon fleur-de-lys and Innocent XIII’s eagle and crown are carefully balanced in the sculptural details. The solution is a gigantic inflation of some conventions of terraced garden stairs.

Today’s uses

During Christmas time a 19th-century crib is displayed on the first landing of the staircase. During May, part of the steps are covered by pots of azaleas. In modern times the Spanish Steps have included a small cut-flower market. The steps are not a place for eating lunch, being forbidden by Roman urban regulations, but they are usually crowded with people. The apartment that was the setting for The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone (1961) is halfway up on the right. Bernardo Bertolucci’s Besieged (1998) is also set in a house next to the steps. American singer/songwriter Bob Dylan refers to the “Spanish Stairs” in his classic “When I Paint My Masterpiece” (1971).

The Spanish Steps, which Joseph de Lalande and Charles de Brosses noted were already in poor condition,  have been restored several times, most recently in 1995.

Fontana della Barcaccia

Fontana della Barcaccia (English: “Fountain of the Old Boat”) is a Baroque fresh-water fountain in Rome, Italy in the Piazza di Spagna, just below the Spanish Steps. It is so named because it is in the shape of a half-sunken ship with water overflowing its bows.

The fountain was commissioned by Pope Urban VIII and was completed in 1627 by Pietro Bernini and his son Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

The shape was chosen because, prior to the river walls being built, the Tiber often flooded and in 1598 there was a particularly bad flooding and the Piazza di Spagna was flooded up to a meter. Once the water withdrew, a boat was left behind in the square.

The English poet John Keats could hear the sound of the fountain’s water flowing soothingly from his deathbed. He said it reminded him of lines from the 17th-century play Philaster, or Love Lies a-Bleeding (1611) and was the source for his epitaph

Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

Trinità dei Monti

Trinità dei Monti (also called Santissima Trinità al Monte Pincio, Trinità del Monte, or Holy Trinity on Pincio Hill) is a Baroque church in Rome. It is best known for its scenographic dominance above the Spanish Steps that descend into the Piazza di Spagna.

History

In 1494 Saint Francis of Paola, a hermit from Calabria bought a vineyard from the Papal scholar and former patriarch of Aquileia, Ermolao Barbaro, and then obtained the authorization from Pope Alexander VI to establish a monastery. In 1502, Louis XII of France began construction of the church of Trinità dei Monti next to this monastery, to celebrate his successful invasion of Naples. Construction began in a cutomarily French style with pointed late Gothic arches. Construction lagged, and a more conventionally Italian Renaissance church, with Carlo Maderno’s façade, was finally consecrated in 1585 by the great urbanizer Pope Sixtus V, whose via Sistina connected the Piazza below with the Porta del Popolo, the main north entrance to Rome.

The Bourbon kings of France remained patrons of the church. During the Napoleonic occupation of Rome, the church, like many others in Rome, was despoiled of its artwork and decoration. After the Bourbon restoration Louis XVIII, the looted artwork was returned, and the present façade was commissioned in 1816 from Carlo Francesco Mazois.

In 1828, under an agreement worked out by Pope Leo XII and Charles X of France, the church and monastery were entrusted to the “Religieuses du Sacré-Coeur de Jésus” (Society of the Sacred Heart), a French religious order, which remained at the church and monastery until the year 2006. In September 2006, the church and monastery were newly entrusted to the “Fraternités Monastiques de Jérusalem” (Monastic Fraternity of Jerusalem), also a French religious order, founded in 1975 by Brother Pierre-Marie Delfieux. The Monastic Fraternity of Jerusalem remains headquartered there still today.

Structure and interior decoration

In front of the church stands the Obelisco Sallustiano, one of the obelisks in Rome, moved here from its position in the Gardens of Sallust and erected in 1789.

In a niche along a corridor that opens onto the cloister, is the putatively miraculous fresco of the Mater Admirabilis, depicting the Virgin Mary, painted in 1844.

In the first chapel to the right is a Baptism of Christ and other scenes of the life of John the Baptist by the Florentine Mannerist painter Giambattista Naldini. In the fourth chapel, the Cappella Orsini, are scenes of the Passion of Christ by Paris Nogari. The main altar has a canvas of the Crucifixion painted by Cesare Nebbia. In the Cappella Pucci, on the left, are frescoes (1537) by Perino del Vaga finished by Federico and Taddeo Zuccari in 1589. The second chapel has a well-known canvas in grisaille by the pupil of Michelangelo, Daniele da Volterra, which imitates in trompe l’oeil a work of sculpture; flanking it are frescoes by Paolo Céspedes and Cesare Arbasia. In the third chapel on the right, also by Volterra, is an Assumption. The first chapel on the left has frescoes by Nebbia. In the sacristy anteroom are more frescoes by Taddeo Zuccari: a Coronation of the Virgin, an Annunciation, and a Visitation.

Convent

The refectory has a frescoed ceiling by Andrea Pozzo. In the cloister there is an astronomical table by E. Maignan (1637). Along a corridor are the anamorphic frescoes (steeply sloping perspectives that have to be viewed from a particular point to make pictorial sense) portraying St John on Patmos and St Francis of Paola as a hermit. An upper room was painted with ruins by Charles-Louis Clérisseau.

By Wikipedia