Spanish Steps "One Shot" from their album "Stories of a Stranger", which contains the lyrics "Rome is burning, you can taste the embers / I am walking hard on Spanish Steps". In 2007, John Tesh of Entertainment Tonight fame, recorded an instrumental tune called "Spanish Steps" on his "A Passionate Life" album. On 16 January 2008, Italian artist Graziano Cecchini covered the Steps with hundreds of thousands of multicoloured plastic balls. He claimed that it was done to make the world notice the situation of the Karen people in Myanmar, and as a protest against the living conditions of artists in Italy.
Spanish Steps of a more famous son, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who is recently said to have collaborated on the decoration. The elder Bernini had been the pope's architect for the Acqua Vergine, since 1623. According to a legend, Pope Urban VIII had the fountain installed after he had been impressed by a boat brought here by a flood of the Tiber. In the piazza, at the corner on the right as one begins to climb the steps, is the house where English poet John Keats lived and died in 1821; it is now a museum dedicated to his memory, full of memorabilia