Terme di Saturnia

In the hills of southern Tuscany, below the old village of Saturnia, a spring pours out almost 800 litres of warm sulphurous water every second at a steady temperature of about 37 degrees. Local legend credits Saturn with it: tired of human warfare, the god hurled a thunderbolt that opened a crater and released waters meant to calm mankind and bring back a golden age. Geologists tell a slower story, of rain that seeps deep beneath Monte Amiata and travels underground for decades, dissolving the carbonate rocks it passes and picking up sulphur, calcium and magnesium before it rises again.

People have bathed here since Etruscan and Roman times, when travellers on the Via Clodia stopped to take the waters. A papal bull of 1188 already lists the Bagno di Saturnia, with lodgings for bathers and a mill downstream turned by the spring's flow. The baths decayed in the late Middle Ages, when Siena razed the outlaw-ridden village in 1300, were restored in 1572 during a drainage scheme, and flourished again from the nineteenth century. The first real hotel went up in 1919, and the present resort, Terme di Saturnia, grew around the original crater, which survives as its main thermal pool.

The water that leaves the resort runs downhill and spills over an old mill weir, the Cascate del Mulino, into a staircase of natural basins. Over time the mineral-laden water has built pale travertine rims around each pool, so that bathers sit in milky blue terraces with the steam drifting off them on cool mornings, in the same family of formations as Pamukkale. The resort and the falls are two quite different experiences of the same spring. Up the hill, the village of Saturnia keeps stretches of its polygonal walls, a Roman gate, the Aldobrandeschi fortress and a small archaeological museum, and the flow is so strong that the resort's pools are renewed completely every four hours.

Getting there

Saturnia lies in the comune of Manciano, about 14 km from Manciano and 56 km from Grosseto; Rome is about 115 km away. The nearest airport by straight line is Perugia San Francesco d'Assisi (PEG), about 95 km away. By car, the usual route follows the SS74 Maremmana, then provincial roads near Manciano and Montemerano.