The curators of The Spanish Steps, Revisited, a special exhibition opening on Thursday, May 1, 2025, at the Keats-Shelley House in Rome, posed a simple but radical question: if you could redesign the Spanish Steps today, how would you do it? The imaginative responses from the participating artists and architects suggest that the Scalinata di Trinità dei Monti, far from being a static monument of the past, is a living symbol of Rome’s layered and contested urban identity.
The current American Academy in Rome community will be prominently represented in The Spanish Steps, Revisited, which is organized by Luca Caddia and Fulvio Chimento with their collaborators Ella Francesca Kilgallon and Carlotta Minarelli. The exhibition marks the three-hundredth anniversary of the Spanish Steps by blending historical inquiry with contemporary vision.
Drawing on a wealth of archival material, the first section of the exhibition explores the political and artistic forces that shaped the construction of the Spanish Steps in the early eighteenth century. Visitors will encounter rare architectural plans and engravings on loan from the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica, and more.
The second part of The Spanish Steps, Revisited shifts to the present, inviting artists and architects to imagine alternative designs for the iconic monument. Here, the American Academy’s ties run deep, with five 2025 Rome Prize Fellows and one 2025 Italian Fellow in the mix. Contributing new works inspired by the history and evolving symbolism of the site are Lex Brown, Michelle Chang, Giuseppe Grant, Sheila Pepe, and the duo of Megumi Aihara and Dan Spiegel.
The Academy’s connection to the exhibition extends further. Stefano Arienti, whose work was recently featured in Artists Making Books last fall, is among the contemporary artists included, as is Elisabetta Benassi, who exhibited in Nero su Bianco, the 2015 exhibition curated by Lyle Ashton Harris (2001 Fellow) and others.
Other artists and architects include Elena Bellantoni, T-yong Chung, Jeffrey Dennis, Michele Di Stefano, Roberto Einaudi, Can Gun, Mojan Kavosh, Gaia Maria Lombardo, Manuel Aires Mateus, Thomas McLucas, Margherita Morgantin, Giorgio Pasqualini, Cesare Pietroiusti, Alfredo Pirri, Spazio in Sutu, Patrick Tuttofuoco, and Italo Zuffi.
The Spanish Steps, Revisited will be on view through November 1, 2025. The Keats-Shelley House partnered with the American Academy in Rome, the British School at Rome, and the Associazione Controcorrete to produce the exhibition.
