Montecatini Terme | The Bath Without People
A Hungarian walks into the grandest spa in Tuscany and finds the era that built it has quietly ended
I grew up around water that smells.
In Budapest, you do not think of this as a flaw. The thermal water comes up out of the ground carrying its minerals with it, iron and sulfur, and whatever else the limestone has been holding for ten thousand years, and it announces itself before you see it. I lived a few minutes from the Széchenyi Bath for years, the great yellow palace of a bath in the middle of the city park, and I went often enough that the smell stopped registering as a smell and became simply the smell of being clean, of being well, of doing the thing my people have done in that water since the Romans dug the first channels and the Turks built the domes that are still standing. I have sat in the Király under those domes with the light coming down in coins through the holes in the roof, and in the Rudas with the old men who go every morning, and the bath to me is not leisure. It is closer to church.
So I should tell you about a couple I once brought to the Széchenyi, because they explain Montecatini better than any history of the place could. The guy was Austrian, and he understood it immediately, the way you understand a thing your grandparents did. The border is right there, the culture leaks across it. His girlfriend was Portuguese, raised in Brazil, and she lasted about twenty minutes. The water smelled, she said. It was too hot. The idea of soaking in smelly hot funny water for hours is just not compatible with her mindset, which is fixated on the clean, cold, wavy ocean shores. She would not be doing this again. She sat at the edge with her feet in and a face that told me the entire enterprise struck her as faintly medical and faintly mad, hundreds of people lowering themselves into warm mineral soup in the open air in the cold, and she was not wrong, exactly, she was simply from somewhere that the water never told to do this. You either come from a bathing people, or you do not. I had never seen it laid out so cleanly as on her face that afternoon. The guy, of course, had the time of his life. His ancestors from the Habsburg Empire came to Budapest for this very reason, soaking in the funny water.
I wanted to tell you this first because it defines my view of any thermal bath experience, from Turkish hamam and Hungarian spa to Roman baths and Japanese onsen (yes, I went to all of these).
So in May, on an hour’s drive from the coast, Sophia and I went to see the grandest example of it in Tuscany, which is the Tettuccio at Montecatini Terme.
We did not go to bathe. It was the wrong season for it, May, the waters are a winter cure, and everyone local knows this, and anyway, we went the way you go to see a cathedral rather than to pray in one. I wanted to stand inside the best surviving version of the thing I’d grown up doing in a humbler key. The Romans invented this in Europe, the public bath as architecture, as civic theatre, water made into a building you could walk through, and Montecatini is one of the places where the nineteenth century tried to build that idea back to its full operatic scale. Verdi came here. Puccini, Toscanini, Caruso. D’Annunzio. After the war, the diva came down from Cinecittà, and Grace Kelly walked the colonnade on the arm of her prince. The whole town was built to be seen in, a stage set for the European leisure class to perform its own health, and, at its peak, eight thousand people a day passed through to drink the waters and be looked at as they did so.
The Tettuccio is staggering. I have been in a great many baths, and I had never seen anything like it. You come in off the Viale Verdi through a colonnade and the place opens in front of you like a small country built entirely for the ritual of drinking measured glasses of mineral water: a central court, fountains, a tempietto for a small orchestra, frescoed halls leading off in long symmetrical perspectives, a writing room with painted ceilings where the cure-takers were meant to sit and compose their letters between glasses, a café the size of a ballroom. It is the architecture of a civilization that believed taking the waters was worth this much marble.
And it was empty. Not closed. Empty.
I walked into the café, that ballroom of a room, and I was the only person in it. One man, standing in a space built for three hundred, under a ceiling painted by someone who assumed the room would always be full. The waiters, when I found them, were unhurried in the way of people who are not going to be busy. Outside in the great court a few visitors moved across the marble at the pace of the very old, because almost everyone there was very old, and the heels did not echo so much as get swallowed by the size of the place. You felt the missing crowd more than you’d have felt a present one. A full room is just a full room. An empty room built for a full one is something else. It is a sentence in the past tense.
We worked out fairly quickly what had happened because we had seen the same thing before in England, at Bath, which sits on the same UNESCO list as Montecatini now, the Great Spa Towns of Europe, inscribed in 2021.
At Bath, you can walk around the Roman bath and look down into the green water, but you cannot get in. The thing the town is named for has become something you can only view. If you actually want to be in the water, you go to a modern annex up the street, a clean glass building with a rooftop pool, and you pay and you bathe and it is pleasant and it is not the same. Montecatini does exactly this. The Tettuccio is the museum of the cure. To take the cure, you go to the Terme Redi, which is essentially a hotel spa, pools, treatments, and a reception desk, and it is fine, and it is run like a wellness business, because that is what survived.
The grandeur and the bathing have been separated from each other. You can have the grandeur, the empty, or the modern bathing. The thing that used to be one thing is now two, and neither half is what the place used to be.
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The town around it tells the same story at a lower volume. It is oversized for the life it now has. Wide boulevards, hotel after hotel, the porticoes of the Gambrinus, cafés and bars and restaurants all built and staffed and lit for a crowd that does not arrive, geared to a kind of luxury tourism that has gone somewhere else or simply stopped existing. We had dinner that evening at La Pecora Nera, a fancy room, the kind of place that in any working resort town you would need to book days ahead, and we walked in without a reservation and had our pick of the tables, because no reservation has been necessary in that town for a long time. The food was good. The room was quiet in a way that good rooms should not be. You eat well, and you feel, faintly, like the last guest at a party that ended without anyone announcing it.
Here is the thing I keep turning over. The waters did not lose their minerals. The architecture did not get less beautiful. The Redi pools are warm and clean, and the treatments work as well as they ever did. Nothing about the place got worse.
People simply stopped wanting it.
Somewhere in the last forty years, the thermal cure stopped being something a working family saved up to do and became something only the old still believe in, and the old are the old, and there is no generation coming up behind them into those waters. I look around every bath I go to now, in Italy at least, and I am the youngest person there by thirty years, and I am 40+.
In Japan, the onsen still belongs to everyone, all ages, it is woven into how the country lives in its own body. Here it feels like the tail end of something. Not a fashion that will swing back. An era closing, the way eras do, quietly, with the lights still on and the water still running and no one left who remembers to come.
I hope I am wrong about this. I come from a bathing people, and I do not want to be the last of them, sitting alone in the ballroom of the Tettuccio while the fountain runs for no one. There is a smaller bath near Pisa (Bagni di Pisa) that Sophia and I drive to most months, where the same thing is happening on a humbler scale, and I will tell you about that one another time, because it is the one we actually get into the water, and the water is the point. But I think about Montecatini more than I expected to. I went to see the grandest version of the thing I love, and what the grandest version showed me was how close to over it might be.
She said it on the drive home, looking at the hills going dark. “Like we’d had dinner in a museum.”
