Rudas Thermal Bath

This guide to the Rudas Thermal Bath in Budapest starts with an unlikely film cameo, the steaming octagonal pool used as a backdrop in the 1988 action film Red Heat, before tracing the real building behind it: an Ottoman-era hammam raised by governor Sokollu Mustafa Pasha in the 1560s and 70s, styled after the great baths of Istanbul. It follows the bath through the end of Ottoman rule in 1686 and the centuries since, as it kept doing exactly what it was built for. Feel the warm stone underfoot beneath that same colored-glass dome.