The famous one Spanish Stepsbuilt with French funds based on a project by Francesco De Santis between 1723 and 1725 and which rises from Spanish Steps to the Church of Trinità dei Monti, Romewas included in the List of properties owned by France inside the Italian capital. The list is present in a document, a report, that the Court of Auditors of Paris periodically updates and in the new version has added the famous Italian monument. In this article we understand what this list is, how it works and we try to clarify the issue.
French Heritage in Rome
In Rome, French heritage counts for a lot five French-speaking churches and dozens of other buildings and various properties in the historic center (all rented, whose income allows for the expensive maintenance of the churches themselves): the main assets are the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, the Church of Sant’Ivo dei Bretoni, the Church of Saints Andrea and Claudio dei Borgognoni, the Church of San Nicola dei Lorenesi and the Trinità dei Monti Complex. These buildings, and everything that is preserved inside them (such as the famous works of Caravaggio in San Luigi) are managed by the Pii Establishmentsan institution placed under the control of theFrench Embassy to the Holy See in the Vatican, as part of an international agreement between the two states dating back to the eighteenth century.
The property, periodically checked, has some features of ambiguity. For example, during fascism, the government of Goodbye Mussolini had asked that the properties of the Pious Establishments and Villa Medici be handed over to Italy, but the procedure was interrupted: the attaché of the French embassy to the Holy See, François de Vial, began to negotiate for avoid the annexation of the Pious Establishmentsaided by Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI. After the end of the war there were no formal updates on the various properties, and everything is still controlled by theEmbassy of France to the Holy See through an administrator (religious, who remains in Rome for four years) and a treasurer (lay, permanent).
What does the Spanish Steps have to do with France? A bit of history
So what does the Spanish Steps have to do with it? The work was built between 1723 and 1725 thanks to the resources invested by the French diplomat Etienne Gueffier: 20 thousand escudos of the time, a considerable sum. Gueffier had the monumental staircase built because at the top of the steps there is the Church of the Santissima Trinità dei Monti, that is, one of the five French Catholic churches.
The new report by the magistrates of the French Court of Auditors, who also denounce poor management by Italy of French assets, worrying security problems and opaque tender procedures, underlines that “the staircase was built with French funds at the beginning of the 18th centuryand subsequently maintained for decades by the Pii Stabilimenti, custodians of the assets from beyond the Alps, but also, on several occasions, in recent years, by the Municipality of Rome, including through sponsorships”, we read in the document (over a hundred pages long). But then, whose is the Spanish Steps?
After centuries of uncertainty and wars, the issue is thorny: the magistrates maintain that it is “confirmation of the “legal status” of the monument is requiredalso to clarify the responsibilities in terms of maintenance and restoration. The document states that the French side had great difficulty in obtaining information due to an “obstinate silence” on the part of the old administrators, so their suggestion, reports the Messengeris to convert the Pious Institutions into a public institutioncompletely revising the rules of the Trinità dei Monti Complex, currently occupied by the religious of the Emmanuel Community under an agreement between Charles X and Leo XII dating back to 1828.
Italy’s reactions in response to France’s claim
Fabio Rampsvice president of the Chamber and deputy of Fratelli d’Italia, commented on the fact by saying that “it’s laughable”, threatening to send “experts to the Louvre to make an updated survey of the goods stolen from Italy throughout history, especially that of the 19th century or donated by geniuses perhaps forced to give up renowned works of art that have made the Louvre the most visited museum in the world”. Long-standing Italian claims that, however, cannot refer to the Mona Lisa, which was regularly sold to France by Leonardo da Vinci or one of his students in the second decade of the sixteenth century.
