Caldarium in the context of "Hammam"

In ancient Rome, thermae (from Greek θερμός thermos, "hot") and balneae (from Greek βαλανεῖον balaneion) were facilities for bathing. Thermae usually refers to the large imperial bath complexes, while balneae were smaller-scale facilities, public or private, that existed in great numbers throughout Rome.

Most Roman cities had at least one – if not many – such buildings, which were centers not only for bathing, but socializing and reading as well. Bathhouses were also provided for wealthy private villas, town houses, and forts. They were supplied with water from an adjacent river or stream, or within cities by aqueduct. The water would be heated by fire then channelled into the caldarium (hot bathing room). The design of baths is discussed by Vitruvius in De architectura (V.10).

A hammam (Arabic: حمّام, romanized: ḥammām), also often called a Turkish bath by Westerners, is a type of steam bath or a place of public bathing associated with the Islamic world. It is a prominent feature in the culture of the Muslim world and was inherited from the model of the Roman thermae. Muslim bathhouses or hammams were historically found across the Middle East, North Africa, al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia, i.e. Spain and Portugal), Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and in Southeastern Europe (notably Balkans and Hungary) under Ottoman rule.

In Islamic cultures the significance of the hammam was both religious and civic: it provided for the needs of ritual ablutions but also provided for general hygiene in an era before private plumbing and served other social functions such as offering a gendered meeting place for men and for women. Archeological remains attest to the existence of bathhouses in the Islamic world as early as the Umayyad period (7th–8th centuries) and their importance has persisted up to modern times. Their architecture evolved from the layout of Roman and Greek bathhouses and featured a regular sequence of rooms: an undressing room, a cold room, a warm room, and a hot room. Heat was produced by furnaces which provided hot water and steam, while smoke and hot air was channeled through conduits under the floor.

A frigidarium is one of the three main bath chambers of a Roman bath or thermae, namely the cold room. It often contains a swimming pool.

The succession of bathing activities in the thermae is not known with certainty, but it is thought that the bather would first go through the apodyterium, where he would undress and store his clothes, and then enter the elaeothesium or unctuarium to be anointed with oil. After exercising in a special room or court, he would enjoy the hot room, known as calidarium or caldarium, then the steam room (a moist sudatorium or a dry laconicum), where he would most likely scrape the by now grimy oil with the help of a curved metal strigil off his skin, before finally moving to the frigidarium with its small pool of cold water or sometimes with a large swimming pool (though this, differently from the piscina natatoria, was usually covered). The water could be also kept cold by using snow. The bather would finish by again anointing his body with oil.

The tepidarium was the warm (tepidus) bathroom of the Roman baths heated by a hypocaust or underfloor heating system. The speciality of a tepidarium is the pleasant feeling of constant radiant heat, which directly affects the human body from the walls and floor.

A notable example at Pompeii is covered with a semicircular barrel vault, decorated with reliefs in stucco, and round the room a series of square recesses or niches divided from one another by telamones. The tepidarium was the great central hall, around which all the other halls were grouped, and which gave the key to the plans of the thermae. It was probably the hall where the bathers first assembled prior to passing through the various hot baths (caldarium) or taking the cold bath (frigidarium). The tepidarium was decorated with the richest marbles and mosaics; it received its light through clerestory windows on the sides, the front, and the rear, and would seem to have been the hall in which the finest treasures of art were placed.

The Thermes de Cluny (French pronunciation: [tɛʁm də klyni]) are the ruins of Gallo-Roman thermal baths lying in the heart of Paris' 5th arrondissement, and which are partly subsumed into the Musée National du Moyen Âge - Thermes et Hôtel de Cluny.