Hannah Walhout's Wellness Check: A Hotel Gym Built Over Italian Ruins
Hannah Walhout's Wellness Check: A Hotel Gym Built Over Italian Ruins
The writer unexpectedly found herself in a glass bottom gym.
While I’ve been to plenty of hotels pools and prioritized checking out all of the amenities when available, just sharing what I like would be a disservice when there are so many well-traveled, high taste friends of SS.
Hannah Walhout is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor covering the cross section of food, travel, design, style, and sustainability. She started her career at Food & Wine and have worked in and around food media ever since. Most recently, she was in-house at Travel + Leisure and still writes for them.
I love when there’s a great story behind something whether it’s a piece of art, the history of a building or some notable, cataclysmic event that took place underfoot. Hannah’s recommendation seems to have a that lore about it.
About the gym at the Radisson Collection, Roma Antica in Rome, Italy, she writes:
“The backstory is just so fun to me — during work on the hotel, which opened this past June, the construction team discovered part of a significant Roman ruin. To be fair is not an entirely uncommon occurrence for building projects in Rome, but still. My understanding is that they were working on the basement when they started to uncover part of the Porticus Minucia, a site where Roman plebeians of the first few centuries CE would go to collect their free ration of grain. It's actually kind of a significant find, I think — archaeologists were able to get a more complete understanding of the site's original layout, and they eventually created a digital 3D model and a video explaining everything, which you can see in the hotel's gym, along with part of the ruins themselves (visible through the glass floor right under the treadmills).
The gym itself is pretty small and, well, it's a gym, so there's only really one main thing to do there. But even if you're not working out it's worth a peek.
Whenever I'm around ruins I like to challenge myself to really imagine what it was like when they weren't ruins—I try to visualize people standing there, visualize them really being people, like people today are people. It's sometimes hard for me to understand time, especially when we're talking multiple millennia, and it's easy for me to slip into assuming that people back then were so, so different, that nobody will ever live the way that we're living right now, which is just not true. So, I would recommend watching the video [in the gym] and getting a sense of what that space once looked like, and then trying to connect that image with the rocks and bricks under your feet.”
(The reels above and below feature some of the video and the gym, and the photos at the end of post show some of the hotel.)
Subscribe to Hannah’s un-self-conscious and weird food musings on her Substack Stream-of-Consciousness Restaurant Reviews.
