Stairway to tension: France and Italy dispute Spanish Step ownership

A row over whether France or Italy owns Rome’s iconic Spanish Steps has caused controversy and reopened old wounds between the two countries as G7 Culture Ministers gather in Naples and Pompeii this weekend.

“I am really very astonished that one can interpret and distort the meaning of a report by the French Court of Auditors that addresses the French and in particular the “Pieux Établissements” for the management of religious property in Italy,” Pierre Moscovici, the President of the Court of Auditors, told the Italian news agency ANSA.
His comments sought to calm a controversy that has arisen over the ownership and maintenance of Rome’s iconic Spanish Steps (Scalinata) – a subject that exploded earlier this month following the publication of a report by the French Court of Auditors on the real estate managed by France in Rome.
These ownership disputes between Italy and France threaten to add tension at the G7 Ministers’ Meeting on Culture, which is taking place this weekend in Naples and Pompeii.
In their report, the French magistrates wrote that a “confirmation of the legal status” of the Spanish Steps is needed to “clarify responsibilities in terms of maintenance and restoration”.
The site, one of Rome’s most iconic for millions of tourists, was designed by Italian architects Francesco De Sanctis and Alessandro Specchi between 1723 and 1726. It was built with “French funds and managed until the end of the 19th century by the Pieux Établissements,” the report points out, but thereafter its care was always Italian and was negligent, according to the French judges.
Among the first to comment on the report last week was Italy’s Tourism Minister Daniela Santanchè: “What would France be without Italy. They cannot do without our luxury, our works, our beauty,’ she wrote on social media. “But now they exaggerate. They even want to take the Spanish Steps of Trinità dei Monti.”
“It’s a laugh,” said Chamber of Deputies Vice-President Fabio Rampelli. “Then we will send experts to the Louvre to make an up-to-date reconnaissance of the assets taken from Italy throughout history.”
The French heritage in Rome consists of five churches: Trinità dei Monti, San Luigi dei Francesi, Santi Claudio e Andrea dei Borgognoni, San Nicola dei Lorenesi and Sant’Ivo dei Bretoni.
Rome also has 13 French properties in its historic centre, including Villa Medici, located on the Pincio hill and home to the French Academy in Rome. This is an estate worth around €250 million (and generating an annual income of €4.5 million), according to the French newspaper Le Monde.
The entrusting of these five churches in Rome to the French institution that manages them is part of bilateral international agreements between France and the Holy See.
These agreements date back to a decision made by Pope Pius VI, who in 1790 instructed Cardinal François-Joachim de Pierre de Bernis, French Ambassador to the Holy See, to place all religious buildings in Rome under his protection.
During the 20-year Fascist era, there was considerable – albeit unsuccessful – pressure from the Mussolini government to return the assets of the Pieux Établissements, including the Villa Medici, to Italy.
The church Trinità dei Monti is at the centre of the current disputes between Italy and France. This is because of a testamentary bequest by the the French patron and diplomat Étienne Gueffier, who invested a large sum of money in the construction of the staircase leading from the Pincio to the Spanish Steps.
When Gueffier died in 1660, he left two separate wills: one for assets in France, and one for those in Italy. In the one on Italian assets, he made a binding allocation of 20,000 Roman scudi for the construction of those 136 steps that have become so famous.
Currently, the Louvre museum in Paris exhibits numerous Italian works that were taken from Italy.
Leonardo’s Mona Lisa immediately springs to mind, but there are also other masterpieces, such as Andrea Mantegna’s Madonna della Vittoria, which was in the church of the same name in Mantua; Cimabue’s Maestà, and Paolo Callari’s Wedding at Cana, which the Veneto region has asked to be returned.
“A month ago, I sent a letter to French President Macron to have the work returned to its original location, and now I will write to the new Minister of Culture, Alessandro Giuli,” Luciano Sandonà, the president of the Regional Commission for Institutional Policies, said in relation to Callari’s canvas.
Adding insult to injury were the words of Silvano Vinceti, who specialises in reconstructing the works and lives of great artists of the past, including Leonardo Da Vinci.
“If one accepts the (French) claims, then the government should make a pressing request to have part of the works savagely taken to Italy by Napoleon as spoils of war,” Vinceti said.
For years, the Italian historian has been campaigning for the temporary return of the Mona Lisa to Italy for an exhibition, reiterating that the initial sale of the work to François I, King of France, had a paucity of historical documents certifying it.
The late art historian Paul Wescher described the Napoleonic spoliations – the removal of works of art, manuscripts, books and precious objects by the French army in various countries in Europe, especially in Italy – as “the greatest displacement of works of art in history.”
The requisitions took place over a period of twenty years from 1796, until the establishment of the Congress of Vienna led to France being ordered to immediately return all stolen works “without any diplomatic negotiations”, as there was no right of conquest.
Most of the paintings and sculptures came from the secularisation of ecclesiastical institutions during Napoleon Bonaparte’s decade of rulein parts of Italy.
Museums and churches in Rome and Milan, along with collections in Bologna, Parma, Ferrara, Verona, Mantua and Venice were all looted. It is virtually impossible to estimate the total number of art works that were taken to France.**
The stolen works included sculptures such as Laocoön and His Sons, Apollo Belvedere and Belvedere Torso, the Capitoline Venus; paintings by Raphael, Tintoretto and Perugino; the Montefeltro Altarpiece (also known as Brera Madonna) by Piero della Francesca – and even the bronze horses of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice.
It is difficult to establish exactly how many works of art were destroyed or dispersed in those days. An emblematic example is the case of Palladio’s Jewel of Vicenza, the ancient silver model of the city, which was melted down by French officials (and reproduced in 2013 to symbolically return it to the city).
Efforts were also made to develop a technique to remove frescoes. Among the most ambitious goals were those of Raphael in the Vatican Rooms. The so-called ‘peeling off’ did not succeed and the undertaking was abandoned.
While most of the looted works remain in France, others have returned to their places of origin, or to museums and collections around the world.
According to a catalogue published in the Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de l’Art français in 1936, out of the 506 Italian paintings taken back to France, 248 remained there, 249 were returned to Italy, and 9 were listed as untraceable – a rare case in Europe of works being catalogued and not returned.
Many of the works confiscated in the pontifical territories were returned thanks to the intervention of Antonio Canova, who was sent to Paris by Pope Pius VII as a commissioner to select the goods to be returned to Italy. In October 1815, he succeeded in having a convoy of 41 wagons leave Paris for various Italian cities.
“I want to reassure our Italian friends: the report only asks for a clarification on the situation of the assets, and when it is clarified it is always positive,” reassured Moscovici.
“Nothing to do with claims, there is no intention to privatise or to empty the meaning that those properties have,” he added. “The aim is to bring centuries-old law into line with facts.”
“The Scalinata is a monumental place of the highest artistic value, but it is also a public thoroughfare and is therefore without discussion an integral part of Rome as the capital of Italy,” Claudio Parisi Presicce, superintendent of Cultural Heritage of Rome, said in a note.
“There seems to me to be a bit of confusion on this matter,” Presicce said. “It is important first of all to separate the administration of the Pieux Établissements de la France à Rome from the management of the Scalinata, which has always been maintained, restored and managed in all aspects by the municipal administrations of Rome since the 20th century.”
Presicce also recalled the two major restorations of the Spanish Steps in 1995 and 2014, as well as the continuous maintenance and restoration work being carried out by Roma Capitale.