Via Margutta is the street, a stone throw from the Spanish Steps in Rome, where traditionally – since the seventeenth Century – one could find the studios of painters, decorators, sculptors, along with the shops of the artisans working around them. Quite transformed by now into apartments the ones, and into trendy boutiques the others, the fame has remained, as well as some of its character.
How the street came to gain its name, and became the center of an artists’ community is described in the article by Carlo Fontana, which was commissioned by a magazine in 1954. He had himself both is studio and his family’s apartment in this street, where he could meet daily some of the most representative artists of the mid-twentieth Century.
In reading the article today, one can feel the nostalgia for the golden era of the street (around the end of the ‘800) when this was the core of the Roman art scene.