spanish steps

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 urbanised 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 stipulated 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.

house of keats-shelley

piazza di spagna 26        www.keats-shelley-house.org

house of de chirico

Giorgio de Chirico was a pre-Surrealist and then Surrealist Greek-Italian painter born in Volos, Greece, to a Genovese mother and a Sicilian father. He founded the scuola metafisica art movement.
You can visit his house  since 1998, only on request

piazza di spagna 31     www.fondazionedechirico.org

via condotti

In Roman times it was one of the streets that crossed the ancient Via Flaminia and enabled people who crossed the Tiber to reach the Pincio hill. It begins at the Spanish steps and is named after conduits or channels which carried water to the Baths of Agrippa. Today, it is the main street in Rome-based Italian fashion, equivalent to Milan's Via Montenapoleone, Paris' Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, Florence's Via de' Tornabuoni or London's Bond Street.

Caffé Greco (or Antico Caffé Greco), perhaps the most famous café in Rome was established at Via dei Condotti 84 in 1760, and attracted figures such as Stendhal, Goethe, Byron, Liszt and Keats to have coffee there. Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of radio, lived at Via dei Condotti 11, until his death in 1937.
Via Condotti is a center of fashion shopping in Rome, dating back to the atelier of Bulgari which opened in 1905. Now, in addition to Valentino, other designers such as Armani, Hermès, Cartier, Louis Vuitton, Fendi, Gucci, Prada, Dolce & Gabbana and Salvatore Ferragamo and many other have stores on Via Condotti

ara pacis

The Ara Pacis Augustae was commissioned by the Roman Senate on 4 July 13 BC to honor the triumphal return from Hispania and Gaul of the Roman emperor Augustus,and was consecrated on 30 January 9 BC by the Senate to celebrate the peace established in the Empire after Augustus's victories. The altar was meant to be a vision of the Roman civil religion. It sought to portray the peace and fertile prosperity enjoyed as a result of the Pax Augusta (Latin, "Augustan peace") brought about by the military supremacy of the Roman empire, and act as a visual reminder of the Julio-Claudian dynasty that was bringing it about.

In 1938 Benito Mussolini built a protective building for the Altar, as it had been reconstructed by Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo, near the Mausoleum of Augustus (moving the Altar in the process) as part of his attempt to create an ancient Roman "theme park" to glorify Fascist Italy.

There is now a new cover building, designed by American architect Richard Meier opene in 2006.The future city plans is to build a wide pedestrian area along the river and run the road underneath it. The idea of opening the piazza to the river to complete the project before the end of his term in 2013.                  http://en.arapacis.it

via del corso

Multiple small designer boutique stores, fashion houses, and/or purveyors of luxury goods usually characterize these locations. These shopping destinations have numerous storefronts with doors and windows facing the street.

villa borghese park

Is a large landscape garden in the naturalistic English manner in Rome, containing a number of buildings, museums (Galleria Borghese) and attractions. It is the second largest public park in Rome (80 hectares or 148 acres) after that of the Villa Doria Pamphili. The gardens were developed for the Villa Borghese Pinciana ("Borghese villa on the Pincian Hill"), built by the architect Flaminio Ponzio, developing sketches by Scipione Borghese, who used it as a villa suburbana, a party villa, at the edge of Rome, and to house his art collection. The gardens as they are now were remade in the early nineteenth century.

piazza montecitorio

it is named after the Monte Citorio, one of the minor hills of Rome.

The piazza contains the Obelisk of Montecitorio and the Palazzo Montecitorio. The base of the column of Antoninus Pius was also once sited here.

palazzo chigi

The building was originally designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini for the young Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi, nephew of Pope Gregory XV. However, with the death of Gregory XV by 1623, work stopped, and was not restarted until the papacy of Pope Innocent XII (Antonio Pignatelli), when it was completed by the architect Carlo Fontana, who modified Bernini's plan with the addition of a bell gable above the main entrance and, being antinepotism one of the main principles of this pontiff, in opponency to most of his predecessors, the building was to be assigned to public and social purposes only.
In 1696 the Curia apostolica (papal law courts) was installed there. Later it was home to the Governatorato di Roma (the city administration during the papal period) and the police headquarters. The excavated obelisk of the Solarium Augusti, now known as the Obelisk of Montecitorio, was installed in front of the palace by Pius VI in 1789.
With the Unification of Italy in 1861 and the transfer of the capital to Rome in 1870, Montecitorio was chosen as the seat of the Chamber of Deputies, after consideration of various possibilities. The former internal courtyard was roofed over and converted into a semi-circular assembly room.
But the original palace was not ideally suited to its new role and it was rebuilt during the early 1900s leaving only the facade intact. The architect, Ernesto Basile, was an exponent of Art nouveau. He added the so-called Transatlantico, the long and impressive salon which surrounds the debating chamber and now acts as the informal centre of Italian politics.

galleria doria panphili

The large collection of paintings, furniture and statuary has been assembled since the 16th century by the Doria, Pamphilj, Landi and Aldobrandini families now united through marriage and descent under the simplified surname Doria Pamphilj. The collection includes paintings and furnishings from the Innocent X's Palazzo Pamphilj (in Piazza Navona), who bequeathed them to his nephew Camillo Pamphilj.

The Palazzo has grown over the centuries; it is likely the largest in Rome still in private ownership. The main collection is displayed in state rooms, including the chapel, complete with the mummified corpse of the family saint. However, the bulk is displayed in a series of four gilded and painted galleries surrounding a courtyard. An extensive suite of further rooms have now been converted to permanent well-lit galleries, containing the more medieval and Byzantine art in the collection.

The palace was renovated for the marriage of Andrea IV Doria Pamphilj Landi to Princess Leopoldina Maria of Savoy, daughter of Louis Victor, Prince of Carignan and Christine of Hesse-Rotenburg in 1767. Work was carried out under the supervision of Francesco Nicoletti, an architect from Trapani.

piazza grazioli 5       www.doriapamphilj.it

galleria colonna

The main gallery (completed 1703) and the masterful Colonna art collection was acquired after 1650 by both the cardinal Girolamo I Colonna and his nephew the Connestabile Lorenzo Onofrio and includes works by Lorenzo Monaco, Ghirlandaio, Palma il Vecchio, Salviati, Bronzino, Tintoretto, Cortona, Annibale Carracci (painting of The Beaneater), Guercino, Albani, Muziano and Guido Reni. Ceiling frescoes by Filippo Gherardi, Giovanni Coli, Sebastiano Ricci, and Giuseppe Bartolomeo Chiari celebrate the role of Marcantonio II Colonna in the battle of Lepanto (1571). An Apotheosis of Martin V was painted by Benedetto Luti. There are frescoed apartments completed after 1664 by Crescenzio Onofri, Claude Lorraine and Pieter Mulier (nicknamed Cavalier Tempesta). Other rooms were frescoed in 18th century by Pompeo Batoni and Pietro Bianchi.

The older wing of the complex known as the Princess Isabelle's apartments, but once housing Martin V's library and palace, contains frescoes by Pinturicchio, Antonio Tempesta, Onofri, Giacinto Gimignani, and Carlo Cesi. It contains a collection of landscapes and genre scenes by painters like Lorraine, Caspar Van Wittel (Vanvitelli), and Jan Brueghel the Elder.

Along with the possessions of the Doria-Pamphilij and Pallavacini-Rospigliosi families, this is one of the largest private art collections in Rome.

via della pilotta 17     www.galleriacolonna.it

galleria spada

The collection was originally assembled by Cardinal Bernardino Spada in the 17th century and added to by his grandnephew Cardinal Fabrizio Spada (1643-1717), and by Virginio Spada (1596-1662). It was originally built in 1540 for Cardinal Girolamo Capodiferro. Bartolomeo Baronino, of Casale Monferrato, was the architect, while Giulio Mazzoni and a team provided lavish stuccowork inside and out. The palazzo was purchased by Cardinal Spada in 1632. He commissioned Francesco Borromini to modify it for him, and it was Borromini who created the masterpiece of trompe-l'oeil false perspective in the arcaded courtyard, in which diminishing rows of columns and a rising floor create the optical illusion of a gallery 37 meters long (it is 8 meters) with a lifesize sculpture in daylight beyond: the sculpture is 60 cm high. Borromini was aided in his perspective trick by a mathematician.

Palazzo Spada was purchased by the Italian State in 1927 and today houses the Italian Council of State, which meets in its richly frescoed and stuccoed rooms.

via campo di ferro 13      www.galleriaborghese.it

phanteon

Pantheon,from Greek: ΠÜνθεον, meaning "Every god"was commissioned by Marcus Agrippa as a temple to all the gods of Ancient Rome, and rebuilt by Emperor Hadrian in about 126 AD. The nearly-contemporary writer, Cassius Dio, speculated that the name "Pantheon" comes either from the statues of so many gods placed around this building, or else from the resemblance of the dome to the heavens. Since the French Revolution, when the church of Sainte-Geneviève, Paris, was deconsecrated and turned into a secular monument, the Panthéon of Paris, the generic term pantheon has been sparsely applied to any building in which the illustrious dead are honored or buried.

The Pantheon is still used as a church. Masses are celebrated there, in particular on important Catholic days of obligation and weddings

via veneto

The official name is via Vittorio Veneto, after the Battle of Vittorio Veneto. Federico Fellini's classic 1960 film La Dolce Vita was mostly centered around the Via Veneto area. This made the street famous in the 1960s–1970s and turned it into a center for upmarket cafes and shops. Following a period of stagnation in the 1980s the street has now found a new life.

trevi fountain

In 1629 Pope Urban VIII, finding the earlier fountain insufficiently dramatic, asked Gian Lorenzo Bernini to sketch possible renovations, but when the Pope died, the project was abandoned. Bernini's lasting contribution was to resite the fountain from the other side of the square to face the Quirinal Palace (so the Pope could look down and enjoy it). Though Bernini's project was torn down for Salvi's fountain, there are many Bernini touches in the fountain as it was built. An early, striking and influential model by Pietro da Cortona, preserved in the Albertina, Vienna, also exists, as do various early 18th century sketches, most unsigned, as well as a project attributed to Nicola Michetti one attributed to Ferdinando Fuga and a French design by Edme Bouchardon.

The Trevi Fountain was finished in 1762 by Giuseppe Pannini, who substituted the present allegories for planned sculptures of Agrippa and "Trivia", the Roman virgin.