My private Italy: the country that steams

There is a version of Italy that never sits still on a map. It bubbles up, quite literally, in dozens of places between the Alps and Sicily, and it has been doing so since long before anyone thought to build a road, a temple, or a spa resort around it. Whenever you come across a village anywhere in Italy with “Bagno” or “Bagni” somewhere in its name, and the country’s map is quietly full of these references, you can be fairly certain a hot spring is, or once was, the reason that village exists at all.

Every time I stand at the edge of one of these springs, feet in water that is warmer than the air around me, I think about how many generations of Italians have stood in that exact same spot doing exactly what I am doing: nothing at all, and loving it.

Why the water is hot in the first place

Italy sits on one of the most geologically restless stretches of the Mediterranean. The peninsula is caught in a slow, ongoing collision between the African and European plates (this is why tremendous earthquakes hit several areas of the country in the past, and why we have the highest volcano in Europe, Mt. Etna) and beneath much of Central Italy the crust is thin, faulted, and still cooling from relatively recent volcanic activity. Rainwater seeps down through limestone and volcanic rock, sometimes for kilometres, gets heated by residual magma chambers or simply by the natural temperature gradient of the Earth, picks up sulphur, calcium, magnesium and other minerals along the way, and is pushed back to the surface through cracks and faults. That is the short version of why, from the Euganean Hills to the Phlegraean Fields, the ground keeps handing us naturally hot, mineral-rich water. The Etruscans and the Romans simply noticed that some pools never went cold, decided that was the work of the gods, and built accordingly.

Turning bathing into a way of life

No people in history have been quite as devoted to hot water as the ancient Romans. For them, the “Thermae” were where business was discussed, where politics were argued, where philosophy was debated in the steam, and where the entire social ladder, from senator to slave, crossed paths under the same vaulted ceilings, even if not on equal terms. Every Roman town of any size had its baths, fed either by furnaces or, whenever geology allowed, by a natural hot spring nearby. Wherever the empire found thermal water, it built monuments around it, and many of the spas I still recommend to my guests today sit on foundations the Romans laid two thousand years ago.

It is this very Roman conviction that water could restore health as well as clean the body that later gave us the word we still use today. The word “SPA” goes back to the Latin phrase “Salus Per Aquam”, health through water, supposedly inscribed above the entrance of ancient Roman baths. Historians debate how literally true that origin story is, but the spirit of it is not in question at all. Long before wellness became an industry, the Romans had already decided that water, properly used, was medicine.

Terme di Caracalla: bathing as imperial theatre

If you want to understand just how seriously Rome took the ritual of bathing, you need to stand inside Terme di Caracalla, Caracalla’s Baths in Rome.  Commissioned by Emperor Caracalla and inaugurated in 216 AD, this was not a bath house, it was a small city devoted to water. The complex could accommodate over a thousand bathers at a time, moving through a sequence of rooms calibrated by temperature: the frigidarium for cold plunges, the tepidarium for a gentle warm-up, the caldarium, heated from below by an ingenious underfloor system called the hypocaust, for real heat. There were gardens, libraries, gymnasiums, and mosaic floors so fine that fragments of them still survive on site. Today the ruins are roofless, but the scale is still staggering, and in summer the space becomes an open-air opera stage, which feels oddly appropriate. Nobody built spas with more ambition and more theatre than the Romans did here.

That devotion to thermal water never really left Italy. It simply moved outward from Rome, following the fault lines, and today you can trace a line of thermal destinations running the length of the country, each with its own personality, its own chemistry, and its own way of making you feel human again.

Abano Terme, in the shadow of the Euganean Hills

Start in the north, in the gentle volcanic hills south of Padua, and you land in Abano Terme, the largest and most established thermal district in Europe. The water here begins as rain falling on the Asiago plateau, then spends an extraordinarily long journey, decades by some estimates, filtering down through limestone before resurfacing already hot and saturated with minerals. Abano has been organised around this water since Roman times, when it was known as Aponus, sacred enough to have its own oracle. Today, it is a more clinical, wellness-driven kind of thermal town, all robes and treatment menus, but the water itself is the same ancient, patient traveller it always was.

The Val d’Orcia and the volcano that keeps it warm

Head south into Tuscany and the landscape changes character entirely, from gentle hills to the golden, cypress-lined curves of the Val d’Orcia, a place I never tire of driving through, regardless of the season. The thermal generosity of this region owes almost everything to Monte Amiata, an extinct volcano whose old magma chamber still radiates enough residual heat to warm the groundwater for kilometres around. It is this quiet volcanic engine, rather than any single spring, that explains why this stretch of southern Tuscany is so unusually rich in hot water, from grand spa towns to the wildest, most informal pools you will find anywhere in Italy.

The proof is scattered across the whole valley. Near Montepulciano, the thermal water surfaces at Sant’Albino, where a modern spa has grown up around a spring long used by the town’s farming families. A short drive away, Bagno Vignoni turns the entire idea of a village square on its head, since its main piazza is not paved at all but is instead a large, steaming pool that the Medici once bathed in and that Saint Catherine of Siena is said to have visited too. Further along, Chianciano Terme has built one of Italy’s most established spa towns around its own springs, drawing visitors for its properties long before the word wellness existed.

Tucked into the wooded slopes of Monte Amiata itself is Bagni San Filippo, and it might be the most photogenic thermal spot in the country. The water here is so heavily loaded with calcium carbonate that it has, over centuries, built its own white limestone formations along the stream bed, culminating in a formation locals call the “Balena Bianca”, the White Whale. You walk through beech woods, hear the water before you see it, and then find yourself standing beside naturally warm pools carved into chalk-white terraces, completely free and open to anyone willing to make the short walk in. It is the kind of place that reminds you Tuscany still has a wild, untamed side.

Terme dei Papi, favoured by Pontiffs

Further south, near Viterbo, the volcanic soul of central Italy resurfaces at “Terme dei Papi”, whose name tells you everything about its clientele over the centuries. Popes, from the medieval period onward, made a habit of coming here to soak in the sulphurous lake known as the Bulicame, a spring so famous that Dante mentioned it in the Inferno. The water still emerges at a striking temperature, rich in sulphur, and the modern complex has grown up respectfully around that original volcanic lake, blending contemporary spa architecture with a spring that has never stopped doing exactly what it has always done.

Terme di Saturnia, and its cascading pools

Continue toward the Tuscan Maremma and you reach what many consider the most beautiful thermal spot in Italy, the Cascate del Mulino at Saturnia. Sulphurous water at a constant, gentle temperature tumbles over a series of natural limestone terraces, forming pools of impossibly turquoise water that are, remarkably, completely free to enter. Etruscans and Romans both prized this water long before anyone thought to charge for access to it, and legend even credits its creation to a thunderbolt hurled by Jupiter. Whether or not you believe that particular myth, standing under one of these small waterfalls at sunset, with the Maremma countryside rolling out in every direction, is about as close to a divine experience as thermal bathing gets.

Giardini Poseidone, closing the journey on Ischia

The line finally comes to rest on the volcanic island of Ischia, in the Gulf of Naples, at “Giardini di Poseidone” (Poseidon’s Gardens). Ischia’s volcanic subsoil produces one of the richest concentrations of thermal springs anywhere in Europe, and an entire garden has been built around that abundance, more than twenty pools set among Mediterranean vegetation, each fed by a spring of a slightly different temperature and mineral composition. It is a fittingly grand, sun-drenched finale to a journey that began underground in the mountains of the north and ends here, on an island, surrounded by the sea that the whole peninsula eventually drains into.

From the Euganean Hills to the Bay of Naples, Italy’s thermal waters trace the same restless geology that shaped the country itself, and bathing in them, as I always tell my guests, is one of the few genuinely unbroken threads connecting us to the Etruscans, the Romans, and every Pope, poet, and traveller who has passed this way since. The water was here before Italy had a name. It will keep rising long after we have all gone home.