Hot springs near Florence, Italy: 6 spa towns within 90 minutes

Montecatini-Terme

The grand old spa town, eleven springs in a Liberty-style park. It has a station.

Written about. No. 14. Read the letter →

Why visit Montecatini-Terme

The spa town sits at 27 meters in the Valdinievole, forty kilometers west of Florence, at the foot of the hills that hold its older twin on the height above. That older settlement predates the town below it: the springs were exploited later, and the modern spa grew up on the flat ground beneath the hill village rather than around it.

The two remain connected by the red funicular, so a visitor moves between them in minutes rather than by road. Each of the four named waters treats a different complaint, drawn from the same eleven springs but separated by mineral content once they reach the surface.

The Thermal Park gathers the pavilions that were built to house this water cure, Liberty and neo-Renaissance architecture arranged as a single walled enclave rather than scattered through the town. In 2021 the UNESCO listing grouped the town with other spa towns built for the same purpose, Bath, Vichy, Baden-Baden and Karlovy Vary among them, recognition of a model of spa town that produced this particular layout: springs, park, pavilions, and a hill town kept deliberately apart from the cure below.

What to see in Montecatini-Terme

• Terme Tettuccio. The most famous of the thermal establishments, designed by Ugo Giovannozzi, with Liberty interiors built on the concept of the Roman baths.
• Parco Termale. Walled thermal park holding the major spa pavilions, laid out around the eleven springs that surface in the lower town.
• Funicolare di Montecatini. The two red cars carry passengers up the hill on rails laid in 1898, the ride lasting eight and a half minutes.

How to get to Montecatini-Terme

It has its own railway station. Florence is about 46 min away by road. The full route from Florence.

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Castelnuovo Berardenga

Free thermal baths at Acqua Borra, in a commune better known for Chianti Classico.

Written about. No. 31. Read the letter →

Why visit Castelnuovo Berardenga

The commune sits east of Siena, where the hills give way to the clay swells of the Crete Senesi. The name comes from the Terra Berardinga, the area controlled in the tenth century by a Frankish nobleman named Berardo, and the borgo grew up around the castle walls the Sienese Republic raised against Florence.

The centro storico, the villa and gardens at its heart, and the surrounding zone of vineyards form one continuous pattern rather than separate parts: fortress town above, wine country falling away below it toward the clay hills. Across the wider territory, 13 castles, 70 churches and 200 farms record the medieval pattern of the Sienese contado, a scatter of small fortified points and parish churches administering land rather than one dominant center.

The place reads as a border post that outlived its military purpose and settled into agriculture and the arts, its castle now a clock tower, its noble villa now a music foundation, its walls now overlooking rows of Sangiovese.

What to see in Castelnuovo Berardenga

• Villa Chigi Saracini. Eighteenth-century villa and Italian garden inside the centro storico, its park designed by the Sienese composer Guido Chigi Saracini, whose family foundation still runs the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena.
• Torre dell'Orologio. Surviving tower of the fortress, now bearing the civic clock, the highest visible point of the centro storico.
• Chiesa dei Santi Giusto e Clemente. Eighteenth-century parish church with a neoclassical façade, built on the site of an earlier Romanesque pieve.

How to get to Castelnuovo Berardenga

Florence is about 1 h 17 min away by road. The full route from Florence.

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San Giuliano Terme

Ten kilometers from Pisa, where the Romans bathed at Aquae Pisanae. It has a station.

Written about. No. 15. Read the letter →

Why visit San Giuliano Terme

San Giuliano Terme sits at 10 meters at the southern foot of Monte Pisano, ten kilometers north of Pisa. The name Aquae Pisanae was the ancient one for the springs that rise here, and the town's own name records the later dedication to San Giuliano rather than to Pisa, though the waters remain tied to the city below by the aqueduct that still carries them there.

The frazioni climb the slope of Monte Pisano itself, olive groves stepping up the lower ground while the plain beneath opens into the pine forests and dunes of the Parco di Migliarino-San Rossore-Massaciuccoli, so the comune runs in one line from mountain ridge to coastal flat with the spa town fixed at the hinge between them. What holds the place together is water moving downhill: from the spring, through the baths where the waters were taken, along the arches to Pisa, and out across the plain toward the sea.

What to see in San Giuliano Terme

• Bagni di Pisa. The restored complex occupies the eighteenth-century Lorena baths, its rooms the ones where Byron, Shelley and Leopardi lodged while taking the waters.
• Acquedotto Mediceo. The line of arches runs from the springs of Asciano down to Pisa, parallel to the modern road, still legible as a single continuous structure across the plain.
• Monte Pisano. The granite ridge above the town, with olive groves on the lower slopes and trails leading to Rocca della Verruca.

How to get to San Giuliano Terme

It has its own railway station. Florence is about 1 h 20 min away by road. The full route from Florence.

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Montepulciano

A working spa, Terme di Montepulciano, in a commune better known for Vino Nobile. It has a station.

Written about. No. 43. Read the letter →

Why visit Montepulciano

The ridge runs between the Val di Chiana and the Val d'Orcia, 70 kilometers southeast of Siena, and the town follows its spine uphill: streets climb from the gates toward the high point, where the main square sits ringed by the buildings that define the skyline from below. The origin predates the Renaissance fabric by centuries.

Etruscan tombs survive in the surrounding hills, though almost nothing of that period shows in the centro storico itself, which was rebuilt wholesale in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries over whatever came before. The wine and the festival both use the climb as their setting rather than their subject: the cellars are cut into the rock beneath the palazzi, keeping a constant temperature for aging, and the barrel race each August sends two men from each of the eight contrade hauling an eighty-kilogram cask up the same gradient that every visitor covers on foot, only slower.

The steepness that shaped the defensive site nine centuries ago is still what a person feels first, in the legs, before the buildings register at all.

What to see in Montepulciano

• Tempio di San Biagio. A 13-meter dome and travertine façade standing alone outside the walls, the ground falling away below it so the building reads as a single volume against the hillside.
• Piazza Grande. The high piazza at the top of the ridge, ringed by the Duomo, the Palazzo Comunale and the Palazzo Tarugi, all rebuilt in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
• Palazzo Comunale. Town hall designed by Michelozzo in the fifteenth century, its tower offering a view over the Val di Chiana and Val d'Orcia.

How to get to Montepulciano

It has its own railway station. Florence is about 1 h 29 min away by road. The full route from Florence.

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Montaione

The least developed here: a natural spring, Sorgente il Palagio, near a hill town above the Valdelsa.

Why visit Montaione

Montaione sits at 341 meters on a ridge above the Valdelsa, in the wooded hills west of Florence on the road toward Volterra. Etruscan and Roman finds at Poggio all'Aglione, Bellafonte and Iano confirm continuous occupation across the territory, material now held in the town's archaeological museum.

The medieval castello was the seat of an autonomous comune from 1256 and passed to Florence in 1369. From the early fourteenth century, glassmaking ran in the surrounding woods, and an eighteenth-century decree by the Grand Duke required master glassmakers to teach the craft to their fellow citizens.

The town joined Borghi più belli in 2007. The territory spreads well beyond the ridge itself.

Five kilometers west, a Franciscan convent founded in 1500 stands in the woods, its chapels laid out as a walkable replica of Jerusalem's holy sites. Ten kilometers south, Castelfalfi carries a separate, older Lombard origin, now a resort with its own vineyards and church.

Between them, the centro storico keeps the civic core: the tower, the palace, the parish church rebuilt on twelfth-century foundations. The comune, in effect, holds three distinct centuries of settlement at once: an ancient scatter of finds, a fourteenth-century craft economy, and a devotional complex from the 1500s, spread across ridge, castle and wood rather than gathered in one place.

What to see in Montaione

• Sacro Monte di San Vivaldo. Complex five kilometers west of the borgo. Seventeen chapels stand among oak woods, each holding a scene built as part of the topographical replica, still reached on foot along the paths between them.
• Castelfalfi. Lombard-origin castle and frazione ten kilometers south, restored as a private resort with vineyards and a Romanesque church of San Floriano.
• Centro storico. Medieval grid on the ridge, with the Palazzo Pretorio, the Torre del Cassero and the Chiesa di San Regolo restored after 1118 foundations.

How to get to Montaione

Florence is about 1 h 7 min away by road.

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Rapolano Terme

38-degree calcium-sulphur water and more than one bath house to choose from. It has a station.

Why visit Rapolano Terme

The comune sits at 334 meters on the eastern edge of the clay hills, twenty kilometers east of Siena. It was called simply Rapolano until 1949, when the spa industry pushed the name change, a shift that marks how thoroughly the waters came to define the place.

The thermal facilities and the quarry sit at some distance from each other within the comune: the springs rise near the centro and to its south, while the travertine beds lie in the Serre frazione three kilometers further out, a separate settlement built around the stone rather than the water. The medieval centro storico, meanwhile, holds no thermal or mineral history at all: a fortified perimeter, a Sienese-period castello on the highest point, and a parish church founded in the eleventh century, all predating the spa industry by centuries.

The clay-hill landscape spreads north and west of the comune, and draws most visitors past the spa itself. What emerges is a town built on two extractive industries, water and stone, wrapped around an older walled settlement that has little to do with either.

What to see in Rapolano Terme

• Terme Antica Querciolaia. Six outdoor pools at 38 degrees, the older of the two facilities and the one tied to a general's convalescence.
• Terme San Giovanni. Thermal complex south of the centro among the clay hills of the Crete Senesi, with outdoor pools facing vineyards and olive groves.
• Cave di travertino di Serre. Active quarries in the Serre di Rapolano frazione three kilometers south, the source of the stone behind the Pienza Duomo's façade.

How to get to Rapolano Terme

It has its own railway station. Florence is about 1 h 17 min away by road. The full route from Florence.

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