It’s merely enough to know that something stimulated human desire, whether born of thirst or longing, to make me acknowledge that something important happened there, over and over again. Everything, even educated guesses on the mysterious stairs, are merely supposition.īut whatever once laid beyond those stairs, whether beloved, a necessity or a fascination – the three main things humankind gravitates towards their entire lives- isn’t important, at least to me. But no one knows for sure and most likely never will. Another theory was that the stairs led to a brothel.
The owner told me that the stairway once led to a fresh water spring before Vesuvius, in 79 AD, covered the area in ash. I’d seen stairs like it before in England and had heard about the ones in Arles, France, but these were much older by at least 2000 years. I saw it in the Fall of 1998 while on vacation in Italy. There’s a ruin of what some believe to be a pagan Roman church in the garden of a private residence, in a very small town just south of Rome, whose stone stairs leading to its alleged former altar are so completely worn through in the center that they resemble what a stick of butter looks like if you held a hot spoon to its center.