Ahead of you climb the 72 granite steps that became the most famous staircase in American popular culture. The Philadelphia Museum of Art sits at the top of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway on a neoclassical Greek Revival temple designed by Horace Trumbauer and completed in 1928. Its collection of more than 240,000 works ranks among the greatest in the country, with outstanding holdings in European painting, American decorative arts, Asian art, and arms and armor.
But most visitors come first for the steps: the 72 granite steps up which Rocky Balboa ran in the 1976 film Rocky, raising his fists in triumph at the top. A bronze statue of Rocky, installed in 1982 and relocated to the base of the steps after debate about its appropriateness, stands to your right. The steps lead to one of the finest views in the city — the Benjamin Franklin Parkway stretching southeast toward City Hall, a Parisian boulevard lined with flags of every nation and the flags of institutions, including the Franklin Institute, the Barnes Foundation, and the Rodin Museum, all built in the Beaux-Arts tradition along the parkway in the early twentieth century.
Run the steps if you like. Everyone does.