Spanish Steps site features

You come into a long, narrow square and the staircase is the far wall of it. The Spanish Steps do not go straight up. They split, curve out, rejoin on a landing, split again — 135 steps in three stages up a 29-metre slope, wide enough at the bottom to be a plaza and narrow enough at the top to be a doorway.

The stone is pale travertine and the treads are shallow and deep, so you walk up them slowly whether or not you mean to. The balustrades curl outward at the turns like the arms of a chair.

At the top, two bell towers and an obelisk stand against the sky — the church of Trinità dei Monti, with the ground in front of it dropping away so sharply that the facade is the only thing you see from below.

At the bottom, a stone boat is sinking. The Barcaccia sits in an oval pool below the level of the street, prow and stern identical so you cannot tell which end is which, its sides so low that water slops over them. Water comes out of seven places — a baluster in the middle, two sun-shaped human faces inside the hull, four more outside — and out of false cannon ports beside two carved coats of arms with three bees.

The square around it is expensive and narrow, with 18th-century fronts, luxury shops running off down Via dei Condotti, and a small brown house at the foot of the steps on the right where a poet died.

The 135 steps

Divided, symmetrical flights up a 29-metre slope on a shoulder of the Pincio, between the Spanish Embassy to the Holy See at the bottom and Trinità dei Monti at the top.

The fleur-de-lys and the eagle

The Bourbon fleur-de-lys and Innocent XIII's eagle and crown are carefully balanced in the sculptural details — the clearest thing on the staircase once you know to look.

Trinità dei Monti

Founded in 1495, at the summit, under the patronage of the Bourbon kings of France.

Fontana della Barcaccia

A boat with identical prow and stern in an oval pool, sides so low it appears to be sinking — and set below street level because the Acqua Vergine had too little pressure.

The seven outlets

The centre baluster, two sun-shaped human faces inside the boat, and four outside.

The bees and the gun ports

Two large coats of arms of Urban VIII with three bees on the outer prow and stern, with water issuing from false cannon-port mouths beside them.

Why it is called the Barcaccia

Turismo Roma ties the word to the boats used on the Tiber at the nearby port of Ripetta, and points also to a reported naumachia in the area — an open-air building for naval games and battles with miniature warships — and to Tiber floods that dragged boats to the foot of Trinità dei Monti.

Keats's house

At the corner on the right as you begin to climb: the house where John Keats lived and died in 1821, now a museum of the English Romantic generation. He could hear this fountain from his deathbed, and it gave him his epitaph — Here lies one whose name was writ in water.