Spas

Under the new order, all open-air gatherings of people are banned, as are sporting events and sporting facilities, including swimming pools, spas, sport halls and ski resorts.

Social distancing due to the coronavirus pandemic closed public gathering places like spas, but a rehabilitation center in Italy left open its thermal pools to patients recovering from the infection.

In the so-called golden age of bathing, people of means flocked to bathhouse palaces for the pampering. Others went to bathhouses in remote mountain towns in the belief that their mineral-rich waters, bubbling from springs deep beneath the earth, offered curative powers. Treatments at bathhouse spas were said to cure everything from nervousness to gout to syphilis.