Issue 22 · 15 October 2026

The Best Seat In The House

Rome fines you €250 for sitting in it.

Since the summer of 2019 it has cost €250 to sit down on the Spanish Steps in Rome. Police walk up and down them in the afternoons and move people along. Eat a gelato there and the fine goes up to €400.

The steps were built between 1723 and 1725 to get people from the Piazza di Spagna up to the church of Trinità dei Monti at the top of the hill. They were drawn as a route. For nearly three hundred years people used them as somewhere to sit, to wait for someone, or to eat lunch and watch the city go past. In 2016 Bulgari, whose shop is at the bottom, paid €1.5 million to clean the travertine. Three years later the city started fining people for sitting on it. A police officer, pointing at an ice cream stain, told a reporter: “Those restorations cost.”

An eighteenth-century etching of the Piazza di Spagna, with the Spanish Steps rising to the church at the top of the hill — The Piazza di Spagna, etched by Giovanni Battista Piranesi around 1750.

Rome is unusual only in charging people to sit on its steps. New York got its stoop from the Dutch, whose word stoep just means step. The brownstones lifted their front doors above the street, and the street sat on the stairs and talked.

Two men sitting and talking on the stoop of a Brooklyn brownstone — A stoop, Brooklyn. From the Dutch stoep, a step.

In the Netherlands, Herman Hertzberger came at it from the other end, and spent decades designing schools around steps meant for sitting. His De Evenaar school in Amsterdam, finished in 1986, has an amphitheatre of steps at its centre, between the classrooms.

Sketch of a school hall with children sitting in groups on wide steps at its centre — A school hall built around its steps, after Hertzberger.

The steps in Rome fill up because they are on the way somewhere. Sitting on a step puts you a little above the people walking past, in among them but out of their path, with the whole square in front of you and nothing to commit to. A step is a seat with a view and an exit.

Every house has a step that someone sits on: the bottom stair while you put your shoes on, the kitchen doorstep in the evening. Nobody drew it as a seat.

I am drawing a set of water terraces at the moment, platforms stepping down from a veranda to a pond, the last two sitting out on the water. On the drawing they are the way from the house to the garden, the same job Rome gave its steps in 1723. I expect they will mostly be sat on, feet over the water. I have drawn them as a route anyway. Rome drew its steps the same way, and now sends police up them in the afternoons to keep people to the drawing.

Aerial drawing of a house with terraces stepping down from the veranda to a pond — The water terraces, as drawn so far.

Reply and tell me which step in your house gets sat on.

Danny
a tropical architect