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Piazza di
Spagna: A few strolls away from the hotel you can find one
of Rome’s most romantic squares. In the centre you can see Pietro
Bernini’s fountain ‘La Barcaccia’ (The Boat) and the beautiful steps
which lead to Trinità dei Monti. Fashion houses and boutiques which
have made the ‘Made in Italy’ very famous, are scattered among all its
surrounding streets, from Via del Babuino, the elegant street of the
antique shops of the last century, and Via Condotti, where you can
find the famous Greco Café, one of the three cafés in the world which
are two hundred years old. While strolling through this beautiful
square you can still feel the romantic atmosphere left on the meeting
points of poets, painters, men of letters of the eighteenth century.
In house number 26, which was built in 1725 on the right corner of the
steps of Trinità dei Monti, John Keats spent his last three months of
his life. Today in memory of his stay in Rome, and Byron and Shelly,
his house has been transformed into the ‘Keats Shelly memorial House’,
one of the most complete museums of the English romantic movement with
collections of original and beautiful letters, pictures and objects of
those outstanding poets. |
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Fontana di Trevi:
Its history is linked to few other historical architectures. In fact,
for almost eight-hundred years and involves many Popes. A genie made
its first project and an unknown artist, Agrippa, built it in 19 b.C.
, where three basins were placed against a high wall, and the water
poured into them through wide fan-shaped slits. In 1453, Leon Battista
Alberti , under Pope Niccolò V, created a single vast basin to replace
the three designed by Agrippa. After having been altered, restored and
reconstructed in the following three-hundred years under different
popes, the first important step towards the fountain we see today took
place in 1623 when the architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini was told to
redesign the fountain. After one hundred years, another sculpture and
architect Nicolò Salvi, gave the fountain its final looks, influenced
by his precursor’s drawings, created an allegory of the forces of
nature. |
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