By Richard Assheton at Air Mail: Europe’s most famous staircase has become the subject of an international dispute between old rivals, after the resurfacing of a forgotten fact.
The Spanish Steps, vaunted alongside the Colosseum and St Peter’s Basilica as one of the “souls” of Rome, are not Italian, nor indeed Spanish. They are French.
A regulator in Paris earlier this month briefly mentioned the steps in a 107-page report into the management of France’s $223 million portfolio of property in central Rome. The assets include five churches, plus historic buildings rented as 180 flats, shops and offices that bring in about $5 million every year.
France’s top auditor of public bodies, the Court of Accounts, suggested they also include the Spanish Steps, which were built with French money in the 1720s. Apparently unaware that it might be controversial on the other side of the Alps, the court said the status of the steps would “benefit from being clarified”.
“It’s laughable,” said Fabio Rampelli, vice-president of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the national parliament. “Then we will send experts to the Louvre to make an up-to-date reconnaissance of the assets taken from Italy throughout history.” He was referring to the fact that countless paintings of Italian origin, most famously the Mona Lisa, reside in France, many of them looted by Napoleon’s men in one of the largest single displacements of art in history.
Italy’s tourism minister, Daniela Santanchè, said: “What would France be without Italy? They cannot do without our luxury, our works, our beauty. But now they exaggerate. They even want to take the Spanish Steps of Trinità dei Monti.”
The president of the Court of Accounts, Pierre Moscovici, told an Italian news agency he was “really very astonished” by the reaction to the report, saying: “I want to reassure our Italian friends … there is no intention to privatise or to empty the meaning that those properties have.”
On his tiled terrace in the center of Rome adorned with white busts, a few minutes’ walk from the steps, a French expert on the matter said of the Italian claim: “It’s completely false. The steps are ours.”
Gaël de Guichen, a former scientist in charge of studying the conservation of the Lascaux caves and their prehistoric paintings in France, is well placed to comment. He has lived in Rome since 1969 working for the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property, an intergovernmental body. Between 1993 and 2017 he was also a member of the foundation that owns French assets in Italy, the Pious Establishments.
