Hotels: First Aloft opens in Montreal

Two of the summer's most buzzed about art shows are at the Prado in Madrid. Through July 13: "Goya in Times of War" is a retrospective devoted to the Spanish artist Francisco de Goya (1746-1828). In more than 200 works, the master painter and printer vividly portrays the brutality of the Spanish war of independence. Most of the pieces are on loan. Some have never been publicly displayed before. Through September: The Prado is also presenting "The Renaissance Portrait: From Pisanello to Rubens," which draws together works from more than 70 artists who helped define the genre. Admission is usually €6, or about $9.40. But admission is free from 6–8 p.m. Tuesday–Saturday, and from 5–8 p.m. on Sundays; museodelprado.es

Paris is buzzing about the decision to build the Signal Tower, a skyscraper resembling four stacked cubes, in the central La Defense district. The tower will climb 71 stories high, just shy of the peak of the Eiffel Tower, according to news reports. It's set to open in 2015, says the International Herald Tribune. Hunter Walker at Jaunted helpfully notes: "The only other seriously tall building in the city is the Tour Montparnasse, which isn't much more than a big, ugly, black box." MORE ON PARIS This Just In

A new book from A.K. Sandoval-Strausz's, Hotel: An American History, is full of fun tidbits. Here are eight facts that surprised us. 1. Hotels as we know them now are a distinctly American invention. Large hostelries had been built earlier in Europe and elsewhere, but these were primarily for kings and nobles. 2. Before the age of hotels, American travelers stayed at inns and taverns where they had to share beds. "After you have been some time in bed," complained one wayfarer in 1767, "a stranger of any condition comes into the room, pulls off his clothes, and places himself, without ceremony, between your sheets." 3. The first U.S. hotel was City Hotel, a five-story, 137-room hostelry located on lower Broadway in Manhattan. It opened in 1797. 4. In the 1840s, Americans considered it to be unpardonably rude to ask for room service because this implied that you thought yourself too good to sit at the same table with everybody else. In the world's first modern democracy, this was unforgivably snobbish. 5. One nineteenth-century minister preached that hotels were immoral. Asked why, he explained that any establishment that sold liquor and contained so many beds had to be sinful. 6. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in hotels, motels, and other public accommodations, was based on an ancient Roman law code from 530, known as Justinian's Digest. The ancient rules prohibited innkeepers from picking and choosing which travelers they would accept as guests and which they wouldn't. 7. The apartment building as an architectural type is partly modeled on the hotel. Throughout the nineteenth-century, many wealthy American families chose to live permanently in hotels because the work of cooking, cleaning, and laundry was done by hotel staff rather than wives and daughters. Building designers soon adapted hotel architecture to create a new kind of shared dwelling. 8. Hotels helped to advance the settlement of the U.S. frontier because they allowed tourists to experience the appealing weather and natural beauty of new places. Hotels like the Antlers in Colorado Springs, the Raymond in Pasadena, California, and the Ponce de León in St. Augustine, Fla., spurred huge migrations to surrounding regions. —A.K. Sandoval-Strausz, author of Hotel: An American History, (text edited for the blog format; interview by JD Rinne)

Heads up: On July 12 and 13, Santa Fe will host the Fifth Annual International Folk Art Market. Handicraft artisans from more than 40 countries—including Zambia, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Rwanda, and Botswana—will gather to sell their wares at Milner Plaza (folkartmarket.org), tickets from $5. The market is set up so that you can meet the men and women who created the artwork for sale, buy international snacks like Cameroonian meat pies from vendors, listen to Japanese Taiko drummers, and watch Chinese dragon dancers in action. Since its inception, the market in Santa Fe has become the world's largest international folk art market. The wares for sale are renowned among art collectors for their affordability and high quality. The market's loftier goals, however, are fostering economic and cultural sustainability for folk artists in attendance: Artists participating in the market are invited to a free, two-day business-development workshop, and the costs of traveling and shipping their goods to Santa Fe are often offset by grants and donations. The only problem is finding a free hotel room when the market is in town, so act fast!