The first surprise is that a half-hour trip by train from Edinburgh to North Berwick is really as far as you need to go for a taste of Scotland that is elemental and remote, a place of windswept beaches, stunning coastal walks and panoramic views. The West Coast and the Highlands may be more extreme, but then so is the journey to get there. This, by contrast, is an easier but no less enjoyable adventure.
This Tuscan spa town offers ancient history and healing waters
29.11.2023 - 08:51 / nationalgeographic.com
The walled town of San Casciano delivers storybook Tuscany—narrow pedestrian-only streets, covered stone passageways, a looming castle, and a café-lined piazza. Outside the walls, the archetypal landscapes of the Val d’Orcia unfurl in all their glory, with rolling fields of vineyards and olive groves punctuated by cypress trees and the profile of a hill town here and there.
While the setting is as idyllic as you might expect, there’s much more to San Casciano than the scenery. Just downhill from the town, nearly a thousand years of ancient history, long-buried in mineral-rich mud, is finally being revealed and is upending scholarly understanding of the period of Etruscan decline and Roman ascension.
At the bottom of the same hill, down a dusty road that’s hard to find unless you know where to look, cars park in a makeshift lot. With towels in hand, visitors walk several hundred yards further down the road to do something that’s as everyday as it is remarkable—soak in the thermal waters that have been bubbling up from the earth here for eons.
The shallow stone-built tubs they wade into were constructed in the 1600s, when San Casciano dei Bagni was part of the Medici-ruled Grand Duchy of Tuscany. The bottoms of the pools are rough with pebbles and occasionally slippery with algae. But bathers don’t seem to mind, especially since these thermal baths are free, unlike the pricey pools at the nearby luxury resort. And at a steady 42 degrees Celsius (107.6 Fahrenheit), the experience is every bit as soothing, if a bit more rustic.
A few feet from the terme libere, or free baths, a chain link fence covered with a privacy screen and secured with a padlock is all that separates these DIY spa-goers from what may well be the most important archaeological find in the Mediterranean this century. It’s an ancient thermal complex that dates to the third century B.C. and was a place of reverence and healing before it was ceremoniously abandoned in the fifth century A.D. Today, the evidence emerging from the site shows that for hundreds of years, and through a period of tremendous social upheaval and near-constant warfare, Etruscans and Romans came together here to worship, leave offerings, and seek cures.
(Feeling frazzled? These soothing hot springs let you unwind.)
Among the stunning finds pulled from the thermal mud are 24 bronzes dating from the second century B.C. to the first century A.D. Many of the bronzes are of body parts—feet, hands, ears, even internal organs, including a uterus and viscera—or are small statues of infants, children, older adults, and deities, and were given as offerings to the healing gods worshipped at the site. Whether they were left as supplications for a cure or in gratitude for the
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