Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle: Casey Callaghan

Constructor: Casey Callaghan and Will Nediger

Relative difficulty: Easy or Challenging (depending on your familiarity with the architecture in question)

THEME: THE SPANISH STEPS (67A: Architectural attraction in Rome depicted by this puzzle's grid?) — a famous Roman staircase leading up to the TRINITÀ DEI MONTI church, and represented here by a staircase-shaped set of circled squares where the "steps" are made out of "Spanish" numbers (UNO DOS TRES CUATRO)

Word of the Day: THE SPANISH STEPS (67A) —

[source: The Morgan Library]

The Spanish Steps (Italian: Scalinata di Trinità dei Monti) in Rome, Italy, climb a steep slope between Piazza di Spagna at the base and Piazza Trinità dei Monti, dominated by the Trinità dei Monti church, at the top.
The monumental stairway of 135 steps is linked with the Trinità dei Monti church, under the patronage of the Bourbon kings of France, at the top of the steps and the Spanish Embassy to the Holy See in the Palazzo Monaldeschi at the bottom of the steps. The stairway was designed by the architects Francesco de Sanctis and Alessandro Specchi. (wikipedia)

• • •

I've never been to Rome, never even set foot in Italy, never heard of the TRINITÀ DEI MONTI, and I only know THE SPANISH STEPS exist from watching a lot (a lot) of Italian "giallo" films of the '60s and '70s:

[La Ragazza Che Sapeva Troppo (1963), d. Mario Bava]

... though I watched Roman Holiday this summer, so I must've seen them then, too:

[Roman Holiday (1953), d. Wyler]

They're also in Anthony Minghella's 1999 adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley:

[The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), d. Minghella]

So they're iconic, and I've seen them (in movies) a number of times, but still, I couldn't retrieve their name (had STEPS and could think only of THIRTY-NINE STEPS — a perfect fit (15!) ... but a Hitchcock movie (1935), not an actual staircase). And I certainly didn't know the name of the church (needed every cross (!) for that one). So I can't say I enjoyed the puzzle, because I just didn't know the reference (not really), so there was no spark of recognition. That's my problem, admittedly. The staircase is certainly famous enough, and if you're familiar with it by name, then I can see admiring this. The one thing I don't really get is the staircase itself. I get that you have built the "STEPS" out of "SPANISH" numbers, but why numbers? And why four? Obviously there are more than four steps. The "staircase" depicted in the grid has eight steps, but as you can see from the pictures above, the actual SPANISH STEPS far outnumber that (135 steps!). So the visual here feels like something kind of tacked on because the constructor(s) made the serendipitous discovery that both TRINITÀ DEI MONTI and THE SPANISH STEPS were a perfect, grid-spanning 15 letters long ... and then couldn't really think of what to do from there. So we get a "staircase" with an arbitrary number of steps and an arbitrary set of Spanish words. To be fair, it's kind of a cute solution to the problem of depicting "Spanish" "steps" — maybe a simple visual pun is enough — but the connection to the actual steps feels pretty tenuous.

["Uno, dos, tres, cuatro!"]

The fill on this one starts out pretty awful (ÉTÉ ENIAC ORANG, all at once, yeesh), but then you get the lovely LACUNA (just me? I love that word) (22A: Unfilled space) and the handsome IGNOBLE and the PRIMROSE PITMASTER who TRIED HARD, and the short stuff gets less ugly, so overall the grid actually ended up being pretty enjoyable to work through. Winced hard at TRADESIES though (43A: Cutesy term for a swap) ... didn't we just have one of these cutesy -SIES expressions? SAMESIES, maybe? TWINSIES? I forget. Anyway, whatever it was, it was more familiar / in-the-language than TRADESIES (?) feels. Also winced at DISTROS, but that's just because I have no idea what that is (42D: Linux software packages, informally). It may surprise you to find that I've spent very little time thinking about [squints at grid] "Linux software packages," let alone thinking about them "informally," so pfft, shrug, if you insist. But again, otherwise, once you get out of that NW corner, this grid seems just fine.

More points of interest:

13A: Lawless princess (XENA) — while XENA may have occasionally (frequently?) stepped outside the bounds of the law, the "Lawless" here represents the actress's name—Lucy Lawless
24A: Half of a Dashiell Hammett detective couple (NORA) — The other half is Nick. The couple is featured in the novel The Thin Man, which was adapted into the classic 1987 movie, Ernest Goes to Camp. Nick & NORA also lend their names to a style of cocktail glass. We have two chilling in our freezer at all times :)

29D: Bright spots? (ATRIA) — had the "A," wrote in AURAS, got briefly (and, it turns out, pointlessly) mad at the whole AURAS v. AURAE problem.
64D: Sunrise direction, in San Salvador (ESTE) — hard to get excited about a piece of crosswordese like ESTE, but I did like that the puzzle managed to work both "Salvador" and "Dali" into the clues (9A: Like the watches in Dali's "The Persistence of Memory"). The choice of "San Salvador" felt like a wink at the earlier Dali clue, which probably wasn't intentional, but it's art, man, you see what you see. And Dali was Spanish too! And he painted staircases! Who's seeing things now?!