Bath

(2 Photos)

How do we explain a city like Bath? The old Roman bath, fed by Britain’s only hot mineral springs, is about one floor below street level. Don’t know if all the new streets and buildings were built on top of old ones, or if the Roman Bath was down one floor originally. The Roman Bath had a swimming-pool-size hot tub, and various rooms including a sauna and steam room. The Kings Bath, the medieval name, was used regularly for bathing until 1939, and while the water is still hot, it is no longer used. There is a restaurant, much newer than the rest of the building, called the Pump Room.

The Cathedral can be seen while standing one level down, next to the Roman Bath. Nearby, the Pulteney Bridge, that crosses the River Avon in Bath, is called the Italian Bridge, because it contains stores, as do the Ponte Vecchio in Florence and the Rialto Bridge in Venice.

Thomas Gainsborough, English painter of portraits, landscapes, and fancy pictures, painted one of his most famous pictures, “The Blue Boy,” in 1770, while he lived in the fashionable spa town of Bath. That painting, along with dozens of other beautiful works of art by Gainsborough, and other capable, accomplished artists, can be seen at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA., next door to Pasadena.

Since most of the paintings at the Huntington Library are really works of art, they obviously haven't been painted by anyone posing as an artist, these past many years.
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Here you can see the large "hot tub," with the Cathedral sitting at street level, a story above the water.