Like its founder, the early Christian church prized spiritual purity over physical cleanliness, which facilitated “sins of the flesh.” Thus, a Christian ascetic who crawled with vermin and reeked of body odor was venerated as a paragon of virtue.

Medieval Christians proved their holiness by not washing. A monk came upon a hermit in the desert and rejoiced that he “smelt the good odour of that brother from a mile away.”

Cleanliness improved during the Middle ­Ages—particularly after the Crusaders imported the Turkish bath. Islamic culture had preserved the Roman traditions of cleaning the body first, then soaking and socializing.

Deprived of sophisticated Roman plumbing, most medieval and renaissance people appear to have bathed less often, but with the same social enjoyment.

 Public bath­houses were popular and well run,  and expectant mothers even used them for “baby showers,” or festive ­“lying-­in baths,” with their female friends. Paris and London had many of these jolly communal “stews”—a term later applied to houses of ­prostitution.

 Because so much sex went on in the public baths of the middle ages, the term “stew” or “stewhouse,” which originally referred to the moist warmth of the bathhouse, gradually came to mean a house of prostitution.
 The church chimed in that the baths encouraged concupiscence, and the stews were closed. From the mid-16th century well into the 19th century in much of Europe, a person could go from cradle to grave without a good wash.

 In England, Elizabeth I declared that she bathed once a month “whether I need it or not.” In Spain during the Inquisition, Ashen­burg says, Jew and Muslim alike could be condemned by the frightful words “was known to bathe.” Nor was sanitation prized in France, where feces left in the halls of Versailles were carted away once a week.

When John Wesley famously re­marked, in 1791, that “cleanliness is, indeed, next to godliness,” he wasn’t talking about the body, but about ­clothes.

--- Cicero

gilt bronze mirror back depicts two women bathing before a statuette of Venus. 2nd century CE . Boston, Museum of Fine Arts.

It was very spacious, and contained all sorts of apartments, side rooms, round and square basins, small ovens, galleries, porticoes, etc., without counting a space for bodily exercises ( palæstra) where the young Pompeians went through their gymnastics. It houses a gymnasium, has walls painted of garden imagery, has several changing rooms and latrines for guests. This was a complete water-cure establishment.

Body care was continued in the "Grande Palestra" a huge rectangular area designed for gymnastic exercises. It measured over 100 metres along each side. A large pool was situated at its centre.

"How have you managed to preserve yourself so long and so well?" asked Augustus of Pollio. "With wine inside, and oil outside," responded the old man.

Woman with Flask: marble statue of a woman wearing a peplos and holding a glass perfume flask. Ostia, c. 30 CE. Rome, Vatican Museum.

Slave attendants addressed all your needs; one of them cuts your nails, another plucks out your stray hair, and a third still seeks to press your body and rasp the skin with his brush, a fourth prepares the most fearful frictions yet to ensue, while others deluge you with oils and essences, and grease you with perfumed unguents. They were perfumed with myrrh, spikenard, and cinnamon; there was the Egyptian unguent for the feet and legs, the Phœnician for the cheeks and the breast, and the Sisymbrian for the two arms; the essence of marjoram for the eyebrows and the hair, and that of wild thyme for the nape of the neck and the knees.

These unguents were very dear, but they kept up youth and health.

The square basin (alveus or baptisterium) which served for the warm baths was of marble. It was ascended by three steps and descended on the inside by an interior bench upon which ten bathers could sit together.

This frigidarium or natatio is a circular room, which strikes you at the outset by its excellent state of preservation. In the middle of it is hollowed out a spacious round basin of white marble, four yards and a half in diameter by about four feet in depth; an circular series of steps on the interior enabled the Pompeians to bathe in a sitting posture. Four niches, prepared at the places where the angles would be if the apartment were square, contained benches where the bathers rested. The walls were painted yellow and adorned with green branches. The frieze and pediment were red and decorated with white bas-reliefs. The vault, which was blue and open overhead, was in the shape of a truncated cone. It was clear, brilliant, and gay, like the antique life itself.

Do you prefer a warm bath? Retrace your steps and, from the apodyteros, where you left your clothing, pass into the tepidarium.

On quitting the stove, or warm bath, the Pompeians wet their heads in that large wash-basin, where tepid water which must, at that moment, have seemed cold, leaped from a bronze pipe still visible. Others still more courageous plunged into the icy water of the frigidarium, and came out of it, they said, stronger and more supple in their limbs.

 

woman's rights in Rome

[195 B.C.]

Resort for the rich famous and patrons of the arts

For the entire duration of the Roman Empire, Naples and Pompeii was celebrated as a rich and elegant cultural centre, where the Roman emperors and aristocracy came to spend the summer months in their sumptuous villas along the Bay of Naples coast and as far as Sorrento on one side of the bay.

The Sybarites were a luxury-loving people who are credited with inventing the steam bath.in the 8th century B.C.,

 The nearby beach in the province of Salerno is long (15 km) Paestum is accessible from Naples by train. The site is a 15 minute walk from the train station.

The city of Naples was founded by Greek immigrants, who ruled over the Gulf of Naples. Then the area was dominated by the Etruscans (525-474). After their defeat, the city again was subjected to the rule of the Greeks (474-425). The cultural mixing began early as the Greeks would send only men out as colonizers.

The struggle for supremacy in the territory of Campania was resolved by another civilization, that of Samnites who came down from the mountains of the Sannio regions. The archaeological excavations have revealed a number of buildings, of Sannitic type, as well as various sculptural and pictorial works referable to the same period.

For more than 3 centuries Pompei remained under their influence, until the end of the III century when the Roman conquered Campania region. Pompei at first was declared "socia" of Rome and it maintained its own institutions and language, then in the year 80 BC. became a Roman colony with the name of "Colonia Veneria Cornelia Pompeii". From then Pompeii was a city with Roman language, customs, architecture, political and administrative life.

The Romans were masters of design with a strong passion for beauty and comfort; they were noted for their building skills and used exact scientific mathematical precision in their buildings. Concrete, easily manipulated, was discovered in the 2^nd Century, B.C. and was considered a technological breakthrough. Concrete has the great advantage of being cast. In other words, you can make it any shape you like. It has the great advantage of being strong, so you can make shapes which bridge large spaces.  The Romans were able to change the form of both exterior and interior architecture, allowing architects to build complex vaults without interior center supports, including barrel vaults, groined (or cross), vaults and the dome and semi-dome. The buttresses of the vaults were an integral part of the interior support system of buildings and the great public buildings like the bathhouses.

In 2002 another important discovery at the mouth of the Sarno River revealed that the port also was populated and that people lived in palafittes, within a system of channels that suggested a likeness to Venice to some scientists. These studies are just beginning to produce results.

 Pompeii,  with approximately 2.5 million visitors a year,  is the most popular tourist attraction in Italy.

Luciana Iacobelli, a lecturer in Pompeian antiquities at Bicocca University in Milan, said the graffiti also surprisingly reveals names of Roman women of various social classes. This suggests it wasn't only women doing the servicing.
"A recent study suggests that also men worked as prostitutes in the Lupanare. Their clients were both women and men," Iacobelli told Naples’ daily newspaper, "Il Mattino."
Unearthed in 1862, the Lupanare underwent several restorations. In 2006 the restoration lasted one year, mainly focused on the frescoes, which had begun to fade.

It was believed the City of Pompeii supported 35 houses of prostitution in 79 AD - about the same number of bakeries - but that was based on the presense of erotic paintings. Using the typical single room configuration, the total is put at 9.

Originally, Pompeii received its water supply from the River Sarno and from wells, but an aqueduct was built when the needs of the city increased. Large lead pipes ran under the pavements carrying running water to the homes of the richest residents, to the public baths, and to the public fountains where the poorer inhabitants obtained their water.

The Mount Vesuvius has been sleeping since 1944 under the watchful eyes of volcanologists, who regularly measure its temperature. Their observatory lies 608m high.

The region's volcanic band includes Stromboli, a remote island to the south, and Sicily's Mt. Etna, which demonstrated a significant period of activity in 2007.

Between 1933 and 1944 Mount Vesuvius  buried several  towns underneath more than 250 million cubic metres of lava. Even the cable car,  well known through the folk song Funiculì, funiculà,  fell victim to the lava .

It's well worth walking the crater rim to admire the slumbering, steaming lava pit below.

The Finnish use of sauna is well documented back to the beginning of their history. 

"The first examples of saunas were simple pits dug in the earth, with heated stones to generate the dry, hot atmosphere. Hot stones remain the hallmark of the sauna, radiating warmth into a small surrounding room, which today is typically built of wood. Dousing the stones with water creates a vapor called loyly by the Finns. Body brushes, called vihta or vahta, and birch branches, are used to stimulate the skin and a healthy sweat." (von Furstenberg, p. 93)

"Situated between two volcanic belts, Japan offers countless natural thermal baths, furos. The tradition of public bathing dates back at least to A.D. 552 and to the dawn of Buddhism, which taught that such hygiene not only purified the body of sin but also brought luck." (von Furstenberg, p. 91)