History
Medieval legends claim that the Holy Stairs were brought from Jerusalem to Rome about 326 by St. Helena, mother of Constantine the Great. In the Middle Ages, they were known as Scala Pilati (Stairs of Pilate). From old plans it can be gathered that they led to a corridor of the Lateran Palace, near the Chapel of St. Sylvester, were covered with a special roof. When Sixtus V in 1589 destroyed the then ruined old papal palace to rebuild a new one, he ordered the Holy Stairs be transferred to their present site, before the Sancta Sanctorum (Holy of Holies), which received its name from the many precious relics preserved there, including the celebrated icon of Santissimi Salvatore Acheiropoieton ("not made by human hands") which on certain occasions used to be carried through Rome in procession. These holy treasures, which since Leo X (1513–21) had not been seen by anybody, have been the object of dissertations by Grisar and Lauer.
Read more about this topic: Scala Sancta
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“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Spain is an overflow of sombreness ... a strong and threatening tide of history meets you at the frontier.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)