The Poor on the Steps of the Convent of Aracoeli (Impressions of Rome)

Rome had been the capital of the new Italian kingdom for barely a year when Zandomeneghi painted this in 1872. Instead of the ruins and costumed peasants that sold well to visitors, he painted beggars sitting on a flight of convent steps, spread across a canvas nearly 170 centimetres wide and only 79 high, so the figures run along the bottom like people you walk past. It went into the Brera exhibition that same year and the Ministry of Public Instruction bought it for a thousand lire, which made the young state the owner of one of the first Italian paintings of straightforward social fact. He signed it at the lower right, Z F 1872, two years before he moved to Paris. The steps in the title belong to the convent of Aracoeli, though the art historian Corrado Maltese argued the church behind them is San Gregorio al Celio, on the other side of the Forum.