The best hot spring towns in Emilia-Romagna

Bobbio

Why visit Bobbio

Bobbio sits on the left bank of the Trebbia at 272 meters, at the foot of Monte Penice in the Piacentine Apennines. The land was granted to Saint Columbanus by the Lombard king Agilulf in 614, and the monastery he raised on it grew, by the eighth century, into one of the principal libraries north of Rome, copying Greek, Latin, and Irish manuscripts that survived nowhere else.

The French suppressed the monastery in 1803; what the scriptorium and library once held now lives in fragments, kept in the basilica and its museum. The town below the abbey is crossed by the Trebbia on the Ponte Gobbo, its eleven irregular arches stretching 273 meters, a shape that gave rise to the story of the Devil and the saint dividing the bridge between them.

Bobbio still carries the Borghi più belli and Bandiera Arancione designations alongside the 2019 RAI title. A river crossing, a hill fortress, and a monastery ruin sit within reach of one another here, each holding a different piece of the same long settlement, one built by faith, one by feudal power, and one by the river itself.

What to see in Bobbio

• Abbazia di San Colombano. The basilica and grounds where Saint Columbanus settled still stand; the scriptorium he founded is gone but its output is documented in surviving manuscripts held elsewhere.
• Ponte Gobbo. The eleven arches sit unevenly across the riverbed, the irregularity of their spacing the source of both the Devil's Bridge name and the Columbanus legend attached to it.
• Duomo di Bobbio. Romanesque cathedral begun in 1075, dedicated to Santa Maria Assunta, with a fifteenth-century fresco cycle in the apse.

How to get to Bobbio

There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Piacenza is roughly 63 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Bobbio

Bagno di Romagna

Why visit Bagno di Romagna

Bagno di Romagna sits at 491 meters at the head of the Savio valley, on the Apennine ridge that separates Romagna from Tuscany. The town belonged to Tuscany until 1923, when Mussolini moved the provincial border so the source of the Tiber would fall inside his native Forlì.

Its name comes from the thermal springs that surface at 47 degrees, rich in sodium-carbonate-sulphur, used by the Romans and continuously since. Two thermal complexes still operate in the centro storico.

The municipality reaches into the Parco Nazionale delle Foreste Casentinesi, the largest old-growth beech and silver-fir forest in central Europe, where the Ridracoli reservoir holds the drinking water for most of Romagna. San Piero in Bagno, the larger frazione four kilometers down the road, was made the administrative seat by royal decree in 1865 while the older Bagno kept the name and the springs.

The town carries Borghi più belli, Bandiera Arancione, and Parco Nazionale recognition.

What to see in Bagno di Romagna

• Terme di Sant'Agnese. Sulphurous thermal complex in the centro storico, drawing on springs that surface at 47 degrees and have been in continuous use since Roman times.
• Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta. Twelfth-century church with a fifteenth-century Della Robbia terracotta and a wooden crucifix attributed to the school of Brunelleschi.
• Parco Nazionale delle Foreste Casentinesi. Old-growth beech and silver-fir forest spanning the Apennine ridge, the largest continuous protected forest in central Europe.

How to get to Bagno di Romagna

There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Forlì is roughly 78 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Bagno di Romagna

Castrocaro Terme e Terra del Sole

Why visit Castrocaro Terme e Terra del Sole

The commune sits at 68 meters on the Montone river, ten kilometers southwest of Forlì in the Apennine foothills, and is the union of two distinct towns rather than one that simply grew. Castrocaro occupies the hill, its castle controlling the valley from above.

The fortress town on the plain below it was built in one campaign to project the authority of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany into Romagna, rather than accumulated over centuries like its neighbor. The Medici governed it until 1923, when the provincial border finally moved and the arrangement ended.

The two halves of the commune read like two different centuries standing next to each other: one shaped by defense over generations, the other stamped out whole by a single ducal decision in 1564. What the pairing adds up to is a rare chance to see, in the space of one small commune, both how a medieval hill fortress evolved and what a Renaissance planner intended a fortress town to look like when built from nothing, a place called Terra del Sole.

What to see in Castrocaro Terme e Terra del Sole

• Rocca di Castrocaro. One of the oldest castles in Italy, standing on the hill above the centro with three concentric defensive rings, built to command the valley below.
• Terra del Sole. Two squares, four gates, and bastioned walls still standing, laid out with the geometric symmetry of a town designed on paper rather than grown over time.
• Palazzo dei Commissari e del Pretorio. On the central square, the residence of the Medici governors of Romagna Fiorentina until 1772, its facade facing the town's planned axis.

How to get to Castrocaro Terme e Terra del Sole

There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Forlì is roughly 19 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Castrocaro Terme e Terra del Sole

Montechiarugolo

Why visit Montechiarugolo

Montechiarugolo sits ten kilometers southeast of Parma at the edge of the Enza valley, on the historical border between the Duchy of Parma and the Reggio territory. The Sanvitale family raised a first military outpost here in 1121; the current castle, polygonal in plan with walls five meters thick and a thirty-meter ditch, was rebuilt by the Torelli after 1406 and hosted Pope Paul III and Francis I of France during the sixteenth century.

The Kingdom of Italy sold the manor to Antonio Marchi in 1864, and his descendants still own and open it. The surrounding fields run with the middle Enza dairies that produce Parmigiano-Reggiano under the Parma consortium.

The commune extends to the Monticelli spa frazione, the only thermal complex in the province. Beyond Parmigiano and the castle, Montechiarugolo holds two institutional signals: Borghi più belli d'Italia and Comuni Virtuosi for its environmental policy.

What to see in Montechiarugolo

• Castello di Montechiarugolo. Polygonal fourteenth-century fortress on a promontory above the Enza, with five-meter walls, a wide ditch, and frescoed halls; still privately owned by the Marchi family.
• Chiesa di San Quintino. Eighteenth-century parish church on the edge of the centro storico, rebuilt after the older medieval pieve was incorporated into the castle complex.
• Terme di Monticelli. Thermal spa in the Monticelli frazione, drawing on iodine-bromine-salt waters discovered in 1924 during oil exploration in the Enza plain.

How to get to Montechiarugolo

There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Parma is roughly 24 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Montechiarugolo

Castel San Pietro Terme

Why visit Castel San Pietro Terme

The town sits on the Sillaro river, which marks the historic border between Emilia and Romagna, twenty kilometers east of Bologna on the Via Emilia. It was founded as a Bolognese castrum in 1200, and the walled core still follows that original plan, with the river bridge on one edge and the road toward Imola leading out past the walls to the pilgrimage shrine beyond.

Castel San Pietro also joined the Città dell'Olio network for its hillside olive cultivation, a rural counterpart to the spa and civic life inside the walls. The Conservatorio Santa Caterina, founded in 1741, is one of the older female educational institutions still active in the region, sitting inside the same historic core as the gateway and the town hall.

The town reads as two things held together: a walled medieval seat on a border river, and a spa destination whose waters predate the walls by decades. Both draw on what was already there long before either was built up for visitors.

What to see in Castel San Pietro Terme

• Cassero. The gateway stands at the southern edge of the old walls, its stone face marking what was once the main entry into the castrum. Inside, the civic theater now occupies the space, so the structure that once controlled access to the town now hosts its audiences.
• Terme di Castel San Pietro. The complex draws on sulphurous, ferruginous and salt-bromine-iodide springs, with the first establishment opened in 1870. The waters run year-round from the same sources used centuries before the modern building existed.
• Santuario del Crocifisso del Piratello. Pilgrimage shrine on the Via Emilia toward Imola, built around a fifteenth-century crucifix and decorated by Innocenzo da Imola. It drew pilgrim traffic from across northern Emilia, standing apart from the walled town on the road out toward Romagna.

How to get to Castel San Pietro Terme

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Bologna is roughly 39 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Castel San Pietro Terme

Comacchio

Why visit Comacchio

Comacchio sits at sea level fifty kilometers east of Ferrara and forty south of the Adriatic delta proper. The town passed through Etruscan hands, then Byzantine rule under the Exarchate of Ravenna, then the Duchy of Ferrara, then Papal government until unification, a succession that left the centro storico layered rather than uniform.

The lagoons that surround it formed from tenth-century subsidence and later silting, and now run as a protected area inside the UNESCO inscription that covers the historic Ferrara plain, linking the town to the wider delta rather than setting it apart. The old town itself is water-built: thirteen islets tied together by bridges, canals threading between the Loggia del Grano and the Loggiato dei Cappuccini, with the bridge acting as the hinge where the inland waterways meet the canal running out toward the sea.

What the layers of rule left behind in stone, the lagoon and the tides have kept in motion around it: a town whose center is inseparable from the water that surrounds it, built up in pieces by whoever governed it at the time.

What to see in Comacchio

• Ponte dei Trepponti. Built around 1638 by Luca Danese of Ravenna, the bridge is the meeting point of three internal canals with the canal Pallotta and the symbol most visible from the water.
• Valli di Comacchio. The lagoon opens flat to the horizon at the edge of the Po Delta, its surface broken by fishing stations and the pink of the resident flamingo colonies.
• Museo Delta Antico. Archaeological museum opened in 2017 inside the eighteenth-century Ospedale degli Infermi, with finds from the Etruscan necropolis of Spina.

How to get to Comacchio

There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Ravenna is roughly 45 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Comacchio

Cervia

Why visit Cervia

Cervia sits at sea level on the Adriatic, twenty kilometers south of Ravenna, between the pine forest of Milano Marittima and the salt pans that have given the town its identity since Roman times. The original settlement, Ficocle, stood inside the saline itself; the move to the coast in 1697 put the grid of workers' housing where it now stands, closer to the water and to the canal port that the tower on its north side was built to guard.

The two halves of the municipality read as a pairing of extraction and leisure: the saline and the old grid town to the south, worked continuously and still yielding salt by hand at one basin, and the planted pine forest to the north, laid out as a garden-city resort in the following century. The museum inside the old salt warehouse holds two thousand years of the tools and records that connect the two eras.

The beach carries Bandiera Blu recognition along nine kilometers of coast. What holds the town together is that its shape was dictated by salt long before tourism arrived: the grid, the tower, the canal and even the forest to the north all trace back to the working of the saline, with the resort at Milano Marittima grown from land the salt industry had left standing.

What to see in Cervia

• Saline di Cervia. Working salt pans covering 827 hectares, the northernmost in Italy, with the Camillone basin still harvested by hand using nineteenth-century methods.
• Torre San Michele. Defensive tower built in 1691 to protect the salt warehouses and control the canal port, on the north side of the harbor.
• MUSA - Museo del Sale. Salt museum inside the Magazzino del Sale Torre, with tools, documents and photographs gathered from former salt workers.

How to get to Cervia

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Forlì is roughly 29 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Cervia

Imola

Why visit Imola

Imola is two cities sharing a name. The medieval one is a quietly handsome Romagna brick town 35 km southeast of Bologna along the Via Emilia, with the Rocca Sforzesca (rebuilt by Caterina Sforza in 1473–1499 — the Tigress of Forlì, who held this fortress through the Borgia siege of 1500) anchoring the centro.

The Palazzo Tozzoni museum, the 11th-century Cattedrale di San Cassiano with its crypt of the city's patron, the Palazzo Sersanti on the central piazza, and the medieval grid of porticoed brick streets all read as a smaller-scale Bologna. The OTHER Imola is the Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari — the 4.9-km F1 circuit on the south bank of the Santerno, built 1953 and named for Enzo Ferrari and his son Dino after Dino's death.

It hosted the San Marino Grand Prix every May from 1981 to 2006 (and again 2020–present), and is the circuit where Ayrton Senna died in 1994 at the Tamburello corner — a memorial still stands there. The Emilia Romagna Grand Prix in April–May is the city's biggest tourist event of the year.

Outside race weekends the circuit is a public park; locals jog the track. The food is Romagna: piadina romagnola (the city is Città dell'Olio, and the local Brisighella Nostrana di Brisighella DOP olive oil is what dresses it), passatelli in brodo, cappelletti, Sangiovese di Romagna from the surrounding hills, and the local nocino walnut liqueur made by every grandmother in the foothills.

What to see in Imola

• Rocca Sforzesca. Caterina Sforza's 1499 four-towered brick fortress at the centro's edge — the Tigress of Forlì held it against Cesare Borgia in 1500. Museum of arms and ceramics inside.
• Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari. The 4.9-km F1 circuit on the Santerno. Senna memorial at Tamburello. Open as a public park outside race weekends — locals jog the track.
• Cattedrale di San Cassiano + crypt. 11th-c cathedral with the city patron's crypt; the Madonna del Piratello pilgrimage church just outside the walls is a major regional sanctuary.

How to get to Imola

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Forlì is roughly 34 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Imola