Jesuit Stairs

This guide to the Jesuit Stairs in Dubrovnik opens with a fourteen-year-old boy named Ruđer Bošković packing his books in seventeen twenty-five, finishing his last day at the Jesuit college above and sailing off to Rome. It lingers on a twist: the grand Baroque staircase you're standing on, modeled by architect Pietro Passalacqua on Rome's Spanish Steps, wasn't finished until seventeen thirty-eight, more than a decade after Bošković left, so he never actually climbed these hundred and thirty-six steps himself. He walked some older, humbler path that no longer exists.