All roads lead to a Rome hotel, but what will you find once you get there?  Clearly, of all the world’s cities, Rome has a complex and intricate past, practically bursting with history; here’s a city that has lasted thousands of years, whose influence spread out over the entire known world, whose life ebbed and flowed with the lives of emperors and popes.  Where to start?  A trip to the Coliseum?  A visit to the city-state Vatican City?  Where does the road lead once you’re inside Rome itself?

You can take walking tours of the Roman Coliseum or Colosseum, once known as the Flavian Amphitheatre, the largest amphitheater the Roman Empire ever constructed.  It only took about eight to ten years to complete, beginning in 70 to 72 AD and finished in 80 AD, under the auspices of two emperors, Vespasian and Titus.  The Colossem could fit about fifty thousand people and, in addition to the gladiatorial games that the movie Gladiator showed, it was also a place for animals hunts, and re-enactments of celebrated battles, both on land and sea, and served as a theater.  Over the centuries, the building was repurposed for entertainment, for religious orders, for a fortress, and even a Christian shrine.  It’s a spot where five hundred thousand people lost their lives, along with approximately a million wild animals in the Coliseum games.  Today, in the 21st century, the remains are still impressive, despite earthquakes and people stealing the stones.

Vatican City became a sovereign city-state inside Rome in 1929.  Known officially as the State of the Vatican City, it’s total population is about 800 people, and therefore is also known as the world’s smallest country (not to be confused with the Holy See, which may be dated back to early Christianity, a couple of thousand years).  The area contains St. Peter’s Basilica, the Sistine chapel, and the Apostolic Palace, and a number of museums.

These two places are a good start.  Then, once you’ve taken a look at Rome, then what?  If all roads lead to Rome, then where do the roads head once you’ve been to this historic city?  The only way to find out is to start walking, taking the same path that led you here.

Following the Road to Rome is a post from: PRSky

Related posts:

1. On the Road and Airport Hotels
2. Troopers on motorcycles expand into education, public relations
3. Impressionism and the “Island of Light” – Ibiza

Harnessing the power of fire is one of humankind’s oldest achievements, as early humans discovered it could cook animals and plants, could help clear forests in order to plant fields, even to treat stones to make tools and to heat clay to make ceramics, allowing for bowls and utensils, and so on. The use of fire first developed in the Early Stone Age, also known as the Lower Paleolithic.  The earliest use we know of to date is that fire began in Israel, at a site known as Gesher Benot Ya’aqov — seven hundred and ninety thousand years ago.  Of course, there’s controversy of the exact date, and there are other sites as well, including the Zhoukoudian, which is also from the Lower oPaleolithic age, in China, and it dates to around four hundred thousand years ago, while another site in Israel, Qesem Cave, contains examples of the controlled use of fire somewhere between two hundred and four hundred thousand years ago.

While these examples are of the use of fire, they weren’t examples of a fireplace.  And the first wood fireplaces were made by simply taking a collection of stones and using them to contain the the fire.  If the fire-users built the fire in the same place again and again, the ashes themselves made a kind of hearth.  Examples of these sites are from the Middle Paleolithic period (some two hundred thousand to forty thousand years ago) in caves in South Africa and Israel (the Klasies River Caves in South Africa were in use around one hundred and twenty-five years ago, for instance).

Evidence of these hearths are found as well in the Upper Paleolithic age (forty thousand to twenty thousand years).  During this time, kilns for making pottery also came into being, found in the Klisoura Cave in Greece, some thirty-two thousand to thirty-four thousand years ago.

Harnessing Fire and the Wood Fireplaces is a post from: PRSky

Related posts:

1. Warm in the Winter with a Wood Burning Fireplace
2. Colder Climes and Hotter Wood Inserts
3. Following the Road to Rome

Relaxing is easy when you have your own hot tub.  It becomes a secondary habit, where when you know you’re feeling out of sorts, had a particularly long day, or even just a sore leg muscle, to get into the hot tub and let the heat and the bubbles work out the troubles.  There’s a wide range of choices for your own portable spa, from sizes as large as swimming pools to small intimate affairs, choices of decor and style, and many extra amenities, like media systems, lighting, and other innovative features.  The technology has come a long way.

This means that it’s easier for you to jump in and enjoy this pleasure and luxury, which is not a recent innovation at all, but has a very long and fascinating history.  It’s not difficult to imagine that they must have been around for awhile, when natural hot springs are found all over the world, and rise up in popularity from time to time.  It’s only a few more steps before it’s a formalized ritual, and becomes like the Finnish bath ceremonies, where it becomes a part of the annual ritual calendar, bathing at the end of the year to make a clean beginning.  Contrary to some opinions, even in the Middle Ages, bathing was not an occasional thing for these Northern Europeans, but part of the regular routine.

Bathing was never just about getting dirt off the body.  It had spiritual connotations since the beginning of recorded history, and was seen as a way of getting spirits off or out.  It still does have spiritual connotations in nearly every part of the world, and every world religion has a bathing ritual in it somewhere, in both history as well as practice.  It was also a very social thing from early times, at least since the Romans started to construct their famous bath houses.  Part of the regimen in the Roman system was to add a massage in between baths of hot and cold water.  This is precisely what the jets are designed to do.  Spiritual and physical cleanliness were part of the thought behind these from very early times, then, and they also understood that massage would add another level of luxury to the experience, and move it from maintenance of health toward actual healing practices.  It’s an old idea, with remarkable modern applications.

The Portable Spa and the End of Innovation is a post from: PRSky

Related posts:

1. Portable Hot Tubs and Consumer Popularity
2. Local PR vet wins national recognition for innovation in research
3. Pierce Mattie Public Relations’ Media Oasis: An Innovation in Luxury Beauty & Fashion PR