Drunk driver tries Rome's Spanish Steps

ROME, June 13 (UPI) -- Italian conservation experts are evaluating the damage to Rome's Spanish Steps after a drunk driver got his car stuck halfway down the famed landmark.

The driver, identified as a 24-year-old Colombian man, mistook the 18th century tourist attraction for a street at dawn Wednesday, and started to drive down the steps at a fair speed, the ANSA news agency reported. After he realized his mistake, the man got out of his Toyota Celica and tried to push it back up the steps, with help from night clubbers who gather at the steps after hours.

The steps are the longest and widest in Europe. When efforts to push the car back to the top proved too difficult, the man and his helpers tried to ease the car to the bottom, ANSA said.

That's when the police arrived and the driver was arrested for driving while intoxicated.

This was not the Spanish Steps' first encounter with errant automobiles. A police officer in a Ferrari chased a thief down the steps in 1963, a car thief drove a Mercedes down the steps in 1993, and a wrong-way driver tried to go down the steps in 2003.