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 City (novel) funfair that inspired Spanish City. Setton is loosely based on the north-eastern English coastal resort of Whitley Bay, where the funfair, ballroom and pleasure palace collectively named The Spanish City was once located. All that currently remains of the Spanish City site is its distinctive white dome and a former ballroom, both of which are to be redeveloped. The town and river of Wiley in the novel, along with its ferry, are probably based on the town and river of Blyth, a few miles to the north of Whitley Bay. Blyth also once had a ferry that carried passengers from