Gatehouse to the Spanish Steps: Building the Keats Shelley House

Gatehouse to the Spanish Steps: Building the Keats Shelley House a talk by Nils Oudshoorn on Thursday 30th October at 5 pm

This year, in addition to a Jubilee Year, Rome will celebrate another important anniversary. In 2025, the Spanish Steps celebrate their 300th anniversary. The steps have been one of the most visited tourist attractions in a city blessed with monuments like no other since their opening in 1725. In the 18th century, the area around the steps became a favourite destination for tourists from many countries. Romantic poets such as Keats and Byron chose to live at the foot of the steps. Remarkable is that, despite this achievement, the story of the monument's turbulent creation, amid protracted international conflicts involving kings and popes, is relatively unknown. Little known too, is that the building that today houses the Keats-Shelley House is an integral part of the design for the steps. 

This lecture delves into the numerous designs made by famous architects, the power struggle in Rome and the rapidly changing city around the steps to elucidate the creation of the Spanish Steps and to shed new light on the part that the Keats-shelley House building plays in the design of the Steps.

Admission is free but booking is required due to the limited number of spaces (please write to info@keats-shelley-house.org).

Entry from 4:45 pm onwards. 

Nils Oudshoorn is currently working as a curator at the Dutch Royal Household. He holds a postgraduate in Building History from the University of Cambridge. Here, he wrote his dissertation on the development and architecture of the foreign academies in the Valle Guilia in Rome, created under the Giollitti and Mussolini administrations. Besides his work Nils writes about architectural history, especially about architecture, interiors and their contexts in Italy in the 18th and 19th centuries.