Towns with hot springs
61 towns across 17 regions, where the water comes out of the ground hot and somebody built a place to sit in it.
These are towns, not spa hotels. Some of them have been bathing since the Romans and have the brickwork to prove it, some run a municipal pool that costs a few euros, and a few have water simply coming out of a hillside with nothing built around it at all. What they share is that the heat is geological rather than plumbed, which is why the Italian health service still writes prescriptions for some of them.
Caramanico Terme
Province: Pescara · 650 m
A 650-meter Majella spa village at the confluence of the Orfento and Orta rivers.
Rivisondoli
Province: L'Aquila · 1,320 m
At 1,320 meters on the Cinque Miglia plateau, a village known for its Epiphany living nativity.
Latronico
Province: Potenza · 888 m
A mountain town at 888 meters on the northern edge of the Pollino, with two prehistoric thermal springs at the Calda hamlet below.
Matera
Province: Matera · 401 m
Cave dwellings carved into limestone since the Paleolithic, called the shame of Italy in the 1950s and made European Capital of Culture in 2019.
Caccuri
Province: Crotone · 646 m
A 646-meter Presila borgo dominated by a sixth-century Byzantine castle with a cylindrical tower built in 1882, birthplace of Renaissance statesman Cicco Simonetta.
Cerchiara di Calabria
Province: Cosenza · 650 m
A village at 650 meters below a mountain rock sanctuary, with a sulphurous cave feeding the thermal springs beneath it.
Bacoli
Province: Napoli · 30 m
A town twenty kilometers west of Napoli, the Roman Bauli, where a cistern fed the imperial fleet at Miseno.
Casamicciola Terme
Province: Napoli · 81 m
Ischia's thermal town on the flank of Monte Epomeo, levelled by the 1883 earthquake and again in 2017, rebuilt on the Gurgitello springs.
Forio
Province: Napoli · 18 m
The largest Ischia commune by area, a Tyrrhenian coastal town facing the island's only sunset.
Pozzuoli
Province: Napoli · 28 m
A Roman port on a volcanic caldera, the Greek Dicearchia and the Roman Puteoli, where a market's columns first proved that the ground itself rises and falls.
Bagno di Romagna
Province: Forlì-Cesena · 491 m
A 491-meter thermal town at the head of the Savio valley, drawing on springs that have run at 47 degrees since Roman times.
Bobbio
Province: Piacenza · 272 m
A 272-meter Trebbia-valley town built around an abbey founded in 614, named Borgo dei Borghi by RAI in 2019.
Castel San Pietro Terme
Province: Bologna · 75 m
A 75-meter thermal town east of Bologna, its sulphurous waters in use since 1137.
Castrocaro Terme e Terra del Sole
Province: Forlì-Cesena · 68 m
A pairing of two towns: a ninth-century fortress on a hill and Cosimo I de' Medici's planned Renaissance garrison town on the plain below, founded 1564.
Cervia
Province: Ravenna · 2 m
The Adriatic salt town with 827 hectares of working saline, planned in 1697 around a grid of salt workers' houses.
Comacchio
Province: Ferrara
A canal town on thirteen islets, with brackish lagoons that hold three hundred bird species.
Imola
Province: Bologna · 47 m
Bologna's Romagna twin — a medieval brick centro anchored by the Caterina Sforza-fortified Rocca, with the Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari (the Imola F1 circuit) wrapping the Santerno river at the southern edge of town.
Montechiarugolo
Province: Parma · 130 m
A Parmigiano-country borgo on the Enza river, built around a fourteenth-century castle that has stayed in the Marchi family since 1864.
Grado
Province: Gorizia · 2 m
An Adriatic island town inside a 90-square-kilometer lagoon, refuge of the Aquileian patriarchs after 568 and a Habsburg bathing resort thirteen centuries later.
Canale Monterano
Province: Roma · 376 m
A hilltop village next to the burned ghost town of Monterano, where a roofless Baroque church and fountain still stand.
Fiuggi
Province: Frosinone · 747 m
The Ernici-mountain thermal town where Boniface VIII and Michelangelo both came to dissolve kidney stones with the oligomineral spring water.
Oriolo Romano
Province: Viterbo · 420 m
A planned sixteenth-century village in the Sabatini hills, laid out in 1560 by a Santacroce nobleman on land cleared from an ancient beech wood.
Tivoli
Province: Roma · 235 m
A travertine town on the Aniene falls twenty-five kilometers east of Rome, holding two separate UNESCO sites: Hadrian's villa below and the Villa d'Este above.
Viterbo
Province: Viterbo · 326 m
The medieval capital of the Tuscia, papal seat for five popes between 1257 and 1281 and home to the longest conclave in Church history.
Bormio
Province: Sondrio · 1,225 m
An Alpine spa town at 1,225 meters where three high passes meet and Roman thermal water has fed the baths for two thousand years.
Darfo Boario Terme
Province: Brescia · 218 m
A spa town where the Oglio leaves the mountains for the plain, next to one of Italy's oldest rock-engraving sites.
San Pellegrino Terme
Province: Bergamo · 358 m
A Liberty-era spa town in the Val Brembana, built around sulfur springs that give the world its mineral water.
Sirmione
Province: Brescia · 91 m
A 4-kilometer peninsula reaching into the southern Garda, its tip closed by a fortified port and a Roman villa.
Acquasanta Terme
Province: Ascoli Piceno · 392 m
A sulphur-spring spa at 392 meters in the upper Tronto valley, where the water still surfaces at 30 degrees.
Genga
Province: Ancona · 322 m
A small Sentino-valley commune at 322 meters whose territory holds the Frasassi caves, the largest karst show cave in Italy.
Acqui Terme
Province: Alessandria · 156 m
A Roman spa town at 156 meters on the Bormida, where a sulphurous spring still surfaces at 74.5 degrees under an 1870 pavilion.
Cannobio
Province: Verbano-Cusio-Ossola · 214 m
A medieval lake town at 214 meters on Maggiore's western shore, host to one of the largest Sunday markets on the lake.
Sardara
Province: Sud Sardegna · 163 m
A Campidano thermal town where Nuragic well-temples, Roman Aquae Neapolitanae and a hilltop Arborea castle share the same hot springs.
Lipari
Province: Messina · 44 m
The largest Aeolian island and the only municipality that administers six of the seven, with a clifftop castle citadel rising above two harbors.
Pantelleria
Province: Trapani · 8 m
A volcanic island closer to Tunisia than Sicily, where dry-stone dammusi sit among bush-trained Zibibbo vines listed by UNESCO.
Sciacca
Province: Agrigento · 60 m
A terraced fishing harbor on Sicily's southwestern coast, built on a spa town of the fifth century BC and a ceramics center since the fourteenth.
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Campiglia Marittima
Province: Livorno · 231 m
A walled hilltop borgo above the Val di Cornia, where the Rocca tower watches a mining landscape worked from the Etruscans to 1976.
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Castelnuovo Berardenga
Province: Siena · 351 m
A commune of 351 meters, the last castle Siena built against Florence, in 1366.
Castelnuovo di Val di Cecina
Province: Pisa · 576 m
A copper and geothermal borgo at 576 meters in the Cecina valley, where natural steam vents and medieval towers sit on the same hill.
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Castiglione d'Orcia
Province: Siena · 540 m
A stone borgo at 540 meters in the UNESCO Val d'Orcia, with two fortresses guarding the road from Amiata to the Via Francigena.
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Grosseto
Province: Grosseto · 10 m
The Maremma capital on the Ombrone river, ringed by hexagonal Medici walls of 1564 that now serve as the city's public park.
Livorno
Province: Livorno · 3 m
Tuscany's working port and Medici-planned 'New City' — a 16th-century planned town built on reclaimed coast, with a Venice-like canal quarter, the Quattro Mori monument, and a 1.5-km seafront promenade that locals call the world's most beautiful balcony.
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Manciano
Province: Grosseto · 444 m
A market town at 444 meters in the southern Maremma, with a Sienese fortress of 1424 and the thermal frazione of Saturnia in its territory.
Montaione
Province: Firenze · 341 m
A medieval glassmaking and truffle borgo at 341 meters above the Valdelsa, with a Franciscan replica of Jerusalem in the woods nearby.
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Montecatini-Terme
Province: Pistoia · 27 m
Eleven thermal springs in a Liberty-style park at the foot of the Apennines.
Montepulciano
Province: Siena · 605 m
A Renaissance hill town at 605 meters on a limestone ridge, aging its Sangiovese-based red in vaulted cellars beneath the palazzi.
Montignoso
Province: Massa-Carrara · 132 m
A Riviera Apuana commune split between the Cinquale coastal frazione, the Castello Aghinolfi on the hill, and the Lago di Porta wetland on the Versilia plain.
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Orbetello
Province: Grosseto · 3 m
A town on a narrow isthmus at the center of its own lagoon, fortified by Spain in 1557.
Rapolano Terme
Province: Siena · 334 m
A Sienese thermal town of 38-degree calcium-sulphur waters and travertine quarries feeding facades beyond its borders.
San Casciano dei Bagni
Province: Siena · 582 m
A hilltop borgo at 582 meters above 42 hot springs that produced the largest Etruscan bronze hoard of the last fifty years.
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San Giuliano Terme
Province: Pisa · 10 m
A thermal spa ten kilometers from Pisa, where the springs were bathed since the Romans called them Aquae Pisanae.
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San Quirico d'Orcia
Province: Siena · 409 m
A walled stop on the Via Francigena at 409 meters in the UNESCO Val d'Orcia, where a twelfth-century Collegiata, a Renaissance garden and the Bagno Vignoni thermal pool sit within fifteen kilometers of each other.
Levico Terme
Province: Trento · 520 m
A Habsburg spa town in the Valsugana at 520 metres, built on arsenic-iron thermal waters.
Meran
Province: Bolzano · 324 m
A Habsburg spa city at 324 metres on the Passer river, palm-lined promenades below 3,000-metre peaks and the gardens where Empress Sissi spent her winters.
Trento
Province: Trento · 194 m
The Alpine capital on the Adige at 194 metres, where the Council that reshaped the Catholic Church met in a castle still standing above the city.
Lugnano in Teverina
Province: Terni · 441 m
A ridge town at 441 meters above the lower Tiber valley, with a 1230 Romanesque collegiata and a late-Roman infant cemetery on the hill below.
Nocera Umbra
Province: Perugia · 520 m
A hill town at 520 meters on the Apennine slope, leveled by the 1997 earthquake and rebuilt, with mineral springs flowing since the sixteenth century.
Saint-Vincent
Province: Aosta Valley · 575 m
A belle-époque thermal town on a sunny south-facing terrace at 575m, where a mineral spring, a landmark casino, and a Matterhorn view north of town define a resort built for the 19th-century cure.
Abano Terme
Province: Padova · 14 m
Europe's oldest thermal town on the Euganean Hills' eastern slope, where 80°C bromo-iodine springs have been drawing bathers since the eighth century BC.
Arquà Petrarca
Province: Padova · 56 m
The Euganean Hills village where Francesco Petrarca spent his last four years and died in 1374, renamed in his honor in 1868.
Battaglia Terme
Province: Padova · 9 m
A barge village at the foot of the Euganean Hills, built around the 1201 canal and Italy's only river navigation museum.