The Most Beautiful Staircases in Europe
10 places in 5 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful staircases in Europe are Spanish Steps (Italy), Bramante Staircase (Vatican City) and Scala Sancta (Italy). The list covers 10 staircases in 5 countries. Italy has the most, with 4. Last updated 14 October 2026.
In Europe a staircase was rarely just a way up. Renaissance and Baroque architects in Italy treated stairs as stage sets, using curves, spirals and forced perspective to turn the act of climbing into a procession. The Portuguese gave the same idea to their hilltop sanctuaries, lining long flights with azulejo tiles, fountains and statues, and older stairs cut into cliffs or towers carry legends of sieges and saints.
The Spanish Steps in Rome, built in the 1720s, sweep up in curving flights from Piazza di Spagna to the church of Trinità dei Monti. In the Vatican, Bernini's Scala Regia uses narrowing walls and columns to make a short, irregular passage look like a grand corridor, and the Bramante Staircase of the Vatican Museums spirals downward in a double helix in which those going up and those going down never meet. In Venice, the Scala Contarini del Bovolo coils up the outside of a palazzo in a tower of open arches.
Other stairs here are carved, tiled or wildly long. The King of Aragon's Staircase at Bonifacio in Corsica descends steeply across the face of a white limestone cliff above the sea, and the Staircase of Santa Maria del Monte in Caltagirone, Sicily, faces each of its risers with hand-painted majolica tiles. Livraria Lello in Porto is a bookshop built around a forked staircase of carved red wood. The Baroque stairway of Nossa Senhora dos Remédios in Lamego climbs past tiled landings to its church, and Jacob's Ladder on the South Atlantic island of Saint Helena runs straight up a steep valley side in hundreds of steps.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Spanish Steps | Stairs | Italy | |
| 2 | Bramante Staircase | Stairs | Vatican City | |
| 3 | Scala Sancta | Stairs | Italy | ✓ |
| 4 | King of Aragon's Staircase, Bonifacio | Stairs | France | |
| 5 | Livraria Lello | Stairs | Portugal | |
| 6 | Jacob's Ladder, Saint Helena | Stairs | United Kingdom | |
| 7 | Scala Regia (Vatican) | Stairs | Vatican City | |
| 8 | Scala Contarini del Bovolo | Stairs | Italy | |
| 9 | Staircase of Santa Maria del Monte, Caltagirone | Stairs | Italy | |
| 10 | Santuário de Nossa Senhora dos Remédios | Stairs | Portugal |
01 Spanish Steps
Scalinata di Trinità dei Monti
Italy · 0.9 km from Rome41.906° N 12.483° E
Image by Leonhard_Niederwimmer from Pixabay The staircase takes the idea of terraced garden steps and inflates it to the scale of a city. More than 130 travertine steps split, curve, gather on landings and divide again, so that the view changes at every turn and the church at the top seems to grow as you approach. The name comes from the Spanish Embassy to the Holy See in a palace at the foot of the steps, but the carving tells a Franco-papal story: the fleur-de-lys of the Bourbon kings is carefully balanced against the eagle and crown of Pope Innocent XIII. In spring, around Rome's birthday on 21 April, part of the steps is lined with pots of azaleas.
Did you know? Drawings from the 1580s show that Pope Gregory XIII was already considering a staircase up to the newly finished façade of the French church.
02 Bramante Staircase
Vatican City · 2.4 km from Rome41.906° N 12.454° E
Image by 16692474 from Pixabay Bramante's ramp inspired Antonio da Sangallo the Younger when he designed the double spiral of the Well of St Patrick at Orvieto. The original is usually shown only on special tours.
Did you know? Giuseppe Momo also designed the Vatican railway station and the Governorate Palace, shaping much of the new city-state created by the 1929 Lateran Treaty.
03 Scala Sancta
Scala Santa
Italy · 2.4 km from Rome41.887° N 12.507° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Miguel Hermoso Cuesta · CC BY-SA 4.0 The rule has not changed in centuries: the central staircase may only be climbed on the knees, usually with a prayer on each step, while four ordinary staircases on either side are for walking. Martin Luther went up on his knees in 1510 and later said he reached the top doubting whether it did any good. Charles Dickens watched the devotion in 1845 and disliked what he saw. Popes have attached indulgences to the climb, and it remains a living devotion; on busy days there is a steady line of pilgrims moving slowly upward.
04 King of Aragon's Staircase, Bonifacio
Escalier du roi d'Aragon
France41.386° N 9.156° E
Myrabella · CC BY-SA 3.0 The name comes from a story rather than from its builders. In 1420 King Alfonso V of Aragon laid siege to Bonifacio for five months, pressing a claim to Corsica based on old papal grants to his family. Local legend holds that his soldiers carved the whole stairway in a single night to take the town by surprise, and were beaten back at the top. The more prosaic explanation is that the stairs were cut over a much longer period by Franciscan monks, to reach a spring of fresh water in the grotto of Saint-Barthélemy at the foot of the cliff — a precious resource on a rock with no water of its own.
Did you know? In late December 1420 Gianno de Campofregoso, brother of the Doge of Genoa, forced his way through the blockade and brought supplies into the town.
05 Livraria Lello
Portugal · 0.8 km from Porto41.147° N 8.615° W
Bene Riobó · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Lello story begins in the 1880s, when José Lello and his family took over and expanded a Porto bookselling business founded by a Frenchman, Ernesto Chardron. The present building was designed by the engineer Francisco Xavier Esteves and opened in 1906. Its facade mixes Neo-Gothic forms with Art Nouveau touches. Inside, almost nothing is what it seems: the ornate "woodwork" of ceiling and walls is largely painted plaster, and the famous staircase is reinforced concrete — one of the earliest uses of the material in Portugal — originally finished to imitate timber and only later given its signature red.
Did you know? The painted figures of Art and Science that flank the upper windows of the facade are the work of the Belgian artist Joseph Bielmann.
06 Jacob's Ladder, Saint Helena
Jacob's Ladder
United Kingdom15.926° S 5.719° W
Luke McKernan · CC BY-SA 2.0 The ladder did not begin as a staircase. It was built in 1829 by the Saint Helena Railway Company, to a design by the local engineer J. W. Hoar, as an inclined plane linking Jamestown with the fort on top of Ladder Hill. Two cars ran on rails up and down the slope, hauled by an iron chain and pulleys connected to a capstan at the top, which was turned by a team of three donkeys. The line carried cargo between the town and the fort. In 1871 termites had so damaged the wooden sleepers that the Royal Engineers removed the rails, cars and machinery, leaving only the steps between them. Originally there were 700; one was later covered over by roadworks.
Did you know? As of 2024 the fastest recorded ascent of all 699 steps stood at 4 minutes 40.75 seconds.
07 Scala Regia (Vatican)
Scala Regia
Vatican City · 2.2 km from Rome41.903° N 12.455° E
Sailko · CC BY 3.0 Bernini turned the problem into a masterpiece of stagecraft. He lined the stair with a barrel-vaulted colonnade whose columns diminish and draw closer as they rise, so the passage appears deeper and grander than it really is — a forced perspective of the kind usually found on a theatre stage rather than in stone. The effect draws the eye relentlessly upward, turning an ordinary climb into a procession. Over the entrance arch, sculpted angels support the coat of arms of Alexander VII, as if the pope's heraldry had just been lifted into place.
Did you know? Horse and rider were carved from a single block of marble, yet Bernini only started cutting it in 1662, years after the stone arrived.
08 Scala Contarini del Bovolo
Palazzo Contarini del Bovolo
Italy · 0.4 km from Venice45.435° N 12.335° E
Didier Descouens · CC BY-SA 4.0 The palace itself dates from the fifteenth century, a city residence for a branch of the Contarini, one of the oldest patrician families of the Republic. The stair came later, in 1499, when brothers of the family commissioned it to dress up the facade overlooking a small courtyard. It is usually credited to Giovanni Candi, though some sources give the design to Giorgio Spavento. Either way, the result is a hybrid that could only have happened in Venice at that moment: Gothic habits of lightness, Renaissance round arches and pale stone columns, and a Byzantine taste for layered, lace-like surfaces set against warm brick.
Did you know? The stair tower was added in 1499 by three Contarini brothers, Pietro, Marco and Giovanni Battista, all members of the Venetian Senate.
09 Staircase of Santa Maria del Monte, Caltagirone
Scalinata di Santa Maria del Monte
Italy · 39.4 km from Ragusa37.239° N 14.512° E
No machine-readable author provided. Gmelfi assumed (based on copyright claims). · Public domain Since 1954 every riser has been faced with hand-painted majolica tiles — the detail that turns a steep civic staircase into a work of art. The tiles form a small history of Sicilian ceramics read from bottom to top, with motifs arranged by period — from patterns in the Arab tradition up to contemporary designs — so the climb becomes a walk through time. One step, the 103rd, bears a reference to the 103rd Psalm. Looking back down from the top, the whole flight narrows into a ribbon of colour against the rooftops.
Did you know? The risers are grouped by century, moving through Arab, Norman, Swabian, Angevin-Aragonese, Renaissance and Baroque styles.
More about Staircase of Santa Maria del Monte, Caltagirone →
10 Santuário de Nossa Senhora dos Remédios
Portugal · 23.4 km from Vila Real41.092° N 7.816° W
Peregrino27 · CC BY 2.0 A chapel dedicated to Saint Stephen stood on the hill from 1361 until it was demolished in 1568, and devotion to Our Lady of Remedies grew up on the same spot. The present sanctuary was begun in 1750, and work on the church and its approach continued, stage by stage, until 1905. The church facade is in an exuberant late baroque and rococo manner, with curving granite ornament set against whitewashed walls. Inside, the main altar holds a carved wooden image of Our Lady of Remedies, side altars are dedicated to Saints Joachim and Anne, and panels of blue-and-white azulejo tiles depict scenes from the life of the Virgin.
Did you know? Each of the statues of the kings of Israel and Judah around the courtyard was carved from a single block of granite.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful staircases in Europe?
- On our list, Spanish Steps (Italy) ranks first, followed by Bramante Staircase (Vatican City) and Scala Sancta (Italy).
- Which country has the most staircases in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from Italy (4), Portugal (2) and Vatican City (2).
- How many steps are in the Spanish Steps?
- There are 135 steps. They were built between 1723 and 1725 to a design by Francesco de Sanctis, linking Piazza di Spagna with the church of Trinità dei Monti at the top.
- What is the Bramante Staircase?
- The name covers two spiral stairs in the Vatican. Donato Bramante built the original around 1505, and in 1932 Giuseppe Momo designed the famous double-helix staircase of the Vatican Museums, in which two separate spirals let visitors ascend and descend without crossing paths.
- What is the legend of the King of Aragon's Staircase?
- According to legend, the soldiers of Alfonso V of Aragon carved the stairway into the cliff at Bonifacio in a single night during the siege of the town in 1420. More likely, it was cut by Franciscan monks to reach a freshwater well at the foot of the cliff.
- How many staircases are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 10 staircases in 5 countries. Italy has the most, with 4.