Pilgrimage at the Spanish Steps

I was recently walking down the Spanish Steps—la Scalinata di Trinità dei Monti—in Rome when I overheard two tourists, rapt and almost mystically enchanted by them. I found their hyperbole irritating. This was a staircase. According to crude materialist thinking, this is all they are. However, as I paced home, I soon rebuked myself. It’s quite easy, if one bothers to pause, perceive, absorb, and contemplate, to see (as these mesmerised tourists did) that they are something far more.

In truth, the Scalinata, with its sun-kissed stone which weaves and curves as a graceful human body, leading one symbolically from a gushing fountain to a fine baroque church, are an embodiment of the old world. They represent almost everything that has been lost since. They are a relic of the European past.

We generally do not engage in long-term projects but think in election cycles and quarters to satisfy the rapacious appetite of our usurious economy. Utility and efficiency are prized over timelessness and permanence. Everything is locked in a puerile instantaneous present. The values of liberal modernity, which are monetary, and of comfort and ease, are inimical to such long-termist taste for the difficult, the costly, the sublime, the well-made, the enduring, and roots.

Man does not live on bread alone, and physical shapes constantly communicate immaterial forms, essences, and messages to our minds.

I take this observation from Michael Knowles, who once acutely observed how every environment you find yourself in will either slightly elevate or slightly depress your spirits. Christ Himself declared similarly by teaching that “the eye is the lamp of the body.” Contemporary scientific discoveries appear to vindicate this. Researchers have measured improvements in brain-wave patterns—particularly in the gamma band associated with heightened cognition and insight—along with calmer heart rates, electromagnetic frequencies, and a general physiological uplift when subjects are surrounded by ordered beauty rather than utilitarian drabness and coldness. 

The eye, we’re beginning to understand, is an extension of the organ of the brain. Where it is drawn, the mind will follow. If it is surrounded by the demoralising, depraved, and abused, it can despair. This is perhaps why cleanliness, fine architecture, well-tended gardens, and beauty are so important. These tangibly communicate to the soul that human love, care, effort, devotion exist. The utilitarian and abused environments communicate the opposite: that one is a cog. A machine. They suggest (incorrectly) all life is meaningless and parasitical struggle, toil, competition, and pollution.

In a deeper sense, as St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, the soul does more than merely register surfaces and receive the intelligible form of a thing itself. Just as the intellect, according to Aristotle in De Anima, abstracts the quiddity—or, the ‘whatness’ and essence—of a house from bricks and beams, so too does the mind ascend, through sensible beauty, towards comprehended archetypes. The Spanish Steps, like a great cathedral or Renaissance piazza, cannot be understood as merely inert matter. If this were so, their potency and power would be inexplicable, compared to, say, a graffitied urban urinal. 

Shapes and colours contain visible signs, almost sacramental in typology, that impress higher realities: harmony, truth, being, hierarchy, and repose. Something within us is drawn upwards, as the mystics knew, from the shadow of material towards the uncreated Light from which all beauty flows. In this mystical economy, the built environment becomes a school of the soul, at every moment streaming in and teaching reverence or, in its absence, accustoming us to spiritual poverty.

Perhaps it’s little wonder that Vienna has been a font for ideas and art, great and terrible, while Leverkusen or Luton have not. Buildings, by shaping the inner consciousness and soul, do more than shelter the body.

The Spanish Steps, just one architectural wonder among many in a great city of seizing impression, embody transcendence. Conceived in the early eighteenth century as a grand Baroque ascent linking the bustling Piazza di Spagna below to the French church of Trinità dei Monti above, they were funded by the bequest of the diplomat Étienne Gueffier, whose 20,000 scudi made possible what decades of papal-French diplomacy had delayed. Designed by the Roman architect Francesco de Sanctis, the 135 travertine steps took shape between 1723 and 1725 in an elegant, terraced cascade—part garden stair, part theatrical gesture. From the top, one is gifted a view over the roof terraces of the melting domes of the eternal city. Ornamented with alternating Bourbon fleurs-de-lys and the eagle-and-crown of Pope Innocent XIII, they embodied a delicate balance of sacred and temporal authority. Inaugurated in 1725 for the Jubilee Year, they were never a mere practical shortcut. 

In Christian mysticism, the ladder of divine ascent—by which one rises through the clouds of the unknown to the presence of God—was predominantly associated with asceticism, repudiation, and apophatic theology. This is the via negativa. But the Catholic tradition, with emphasis on beauty and chant and music and feasts, has typically placed more importance on the inverse way to God. Though both are important, the via affirmativa, supported by cataphatic theology, is more central—emphasised by the fact that the Church celebrates Lent for 40 days but Easter for a symbolically longer 50. 

The Spanish Steps, too, were an invitation to such a cataphatic ascent: they took the climber from the profane hum of the city toward the sacred heights, carved in stone with the confidence that beauty and permanence mattered more than haste or cost.

But such confidence is alien today. My friend reflected on the building of Florence’s mesmerisingly great Duomo: 

The conditions which created the duomo are so alien to us that it’s a good example of how the past is a foreign country. The sole matter of size presented a problem because of insufficient technology, whereas we now have means to create mammoth objects, but seemingly not the will—and thus not actually the means—to make them beautiful.

She continued: “There was a default assumption that the most ambitious and costly project at hand should be created for the sake of praising God, soli Deo gloria. This flies in the face of all democratic or faux-democratic assumptions (about the sovereignty of the masses) about architecture and public life we have now. It was accepted very widely that the construction of said implausible edifice should be attempted even if it takes forever, involving untold cost.”

“Ultimately, in the world of the Duomo,” she added, “the idea of spending a lifetime on something which is unlikely to be finished was not alarming; that speaks so clearly to a certainty in eternal life and also to the view that what comes after you warrants the effort of a lifetime.”

Begun in 1296 and not consecrated until 1436, when Filippo Brunelleschi’s audacious dome was completed only after more than a century of collective labour and ingenuity, the Duomo rose under these convictions. When the dome’s foundations were laid, no known architectural method for completing a project on such a scale was known. As the TV series i Medici portrays, it took the persistent patronage of Florence’s greatest banking family and the innovative guesswork of her most brilliant minds to achieve. Generations toiled in the knowledge that they might never see the finished work.

Today, we possess cranes, reinforced concrete, and computational modelling; what we lack is the will, and therefore the true capacity, to produce such greatness. 

Also at fault are our democratic, egalitarian, mercantile modern sensibilities. The great are cut down to size. Refined taste is elitism, and all must be marketed so as to be accessible to the masses as a lowest common denominator. The Scalinata instead raise passersby up—in a way, as for these tourists, they may just never forget.

Kenneth Clark, in Civilisation, quoted John Ruskin, the esteemed Victorian art critic, who said, “Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last.”

Clark continued: “If I had to say which was telling the truth about society, a speech by a Minister of Housing or the actual buildings put up in his time, I should believe the buildings.”

Clark understood civilisations reveal their inner order—or disorder—most reliably in what they choose to raise. Where once confidence in divine order and eternity produced grandeur in marble, liberal modernity substitutes comfort and ease, short-term yield and bureaucratic metrics. We erect glass-and-steel boxes optimised for energy ratings and quarterly returns, or—when ambition inexplicably happens to capture us once in a blue moon—kitsch monuments to cut corners in the name of ‘efficiency’ and ‘environmental’ targets. 

Planners and penny-pinchers will assure us that, should the apocalypse come, it will be the costly, beautiful staircase we once dared to raise that finally tipped us over into the abyss. While we can afford to spare millions each year on crass and forgettable entertainment, and our governments fund ‘gender programmes’ and interpretive dance classes on the far side of the world with foreign aid, I disagree.

The Scalinata are an indictment against our age. It’s worth taking a walk along the Spanish Steps, should you ever find yourself in Rome, and reflecting how totally the short-termist mentality (their opposite) permeates nearly every area of our modern lives. Not all wealth is monetary, and we’re the poorer for it.