19th of September, 1991 was an important date for shoe history. On this day, a mummy was found in a glacier in the Ötztal Alps. Researchers also discovered a pair of well-preserved primitive shoes on so-called Ötzi's feet. The shoe uppers were made of deerskin, the insides of the shoes were made of woven linden bast, the cushioning and isolating layers were made of grass fibres, and the soles were made of bearskin. The footwear was estimated to be roughly 5,300 years old. This discovery, combined with research conducted upon 40,000-year-old Chinese skeletons as well as paintings found in the Altamira Cave dating back to 15,000 - 12,000 B.C., demonstrates that humans developed the need to protect their feet from the elements quite early on.

shoe history cannot be traced back to a single, original shoe. Different climactic regions required different kinds of footwear, from animal furs wrapped around the feet and calves to palm leaves bound beneath the foot. These kinds of early shoes offered protection from the cold and heat, respectively. In cold regions inventions like these were the predecessors of boots, whereas in hot regions they served as the prototypes for sandals. As such, shoe development was strongly influenced by respective conditions.

round 1568, Florentine nun Plautilla Nelli—a self-taught painter who ran an all-woman artists’ workshop out of her convent—embarked on her most ambitious project yet: a monumental Last Supper scene featuring life-size depictions of Jesus and the 12 Apostles.

The Florentine monastery of Santa Maria Novella acquired the painting in 1817, housing it in the refectory before moving it to a new location around 1865. In 1911, scholar Giovanna Pierattini reported, the portable panel was “removed from its stretcher, rolled up and moved to a warehouse, where it remained neglected for almost three decades.”

Plautilla’s Last Supper remained in storage until 1939, when it underwent significant restoration. Returned to the refectory, the painting sustained slight damage during the momentous flooding of Florence in

the infamous Tower of London has also been home to many ordinary people since it was built in 1066.

But the recent discovery of the remains of a woman and a girl have managed to shed even more light on what life was like in the fortress during the late Medieval and early Tudor period. The Tower of London is a famous landmark located in the center of London and is most renowned for housing the U.K. crown jewels as well as being the final resting place of three executed English queens, including two of King Henry VIII’s six wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. It’s the burial site for many of the people condemned as ‘traitors’ to the crown and beheaded on nearby Tower Hill.

For centuries the Tower was the most important military fortress in the United Kingdom, but over its almost 1000-year history, plenty of ordinary people lived there too. “During the late medieval and early Tudor period the Tower would have been a thriving mini village,” said the Historic Royal Palaces, the independent charity that look after a number of royal landmarks around London, in a press statement. “It would have served as not only a royal residence, but it operated daily functions as the Office of Ordnance and Royal Mint with its own chapels and pubs, with hundreds of people working and living amongst its walls.”

The National Weather Service says this next round of dangerous fire weather could be the strongest of the year for the area and could be the worst wind event since the 2017 Wine Country fires.

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