Bagno Vignoni

Bagno Vignoni in the Val d'Orcia of Tuscany is one of the most visually extraordinary spa villages in the world, centred on a magnificent Renaissance piazza that is not a conventional town square but a vast open thermal pool, the Vasca della Piazza, from which sulphurous bicarbonate spring water has steamed into the Tuscan air since Etruscan times and which Lorenzo de' Medici, Pope Pius II, and Saint Catherine of Siena all visited to take the waters. The Val d'Orcia's UNESCO World Heritage landscape of cypress-lined roads, medieval hilltop towns, and wheat fields rolling to the horizon surrounds this extraordinary thermal hamlet, where the historic piazza-pool is now protected as a national monument and contemporary bathing is conducted in the pools of the thermal park below the village on the banks of the Orcia River. The combination of Renaissance history, Etruscan therapeutic heritage, UNESCO landscape setting, and the unique visual spectacle of a medieval Italian piazza that is simultaneously a thermal spring makes Bagno Vignoni one of the most singular and memorable spa destinations in the world.