Bagno Vignoni

Bagno Vignoni is one of Tuscany's most unusual villages, distinguished by its central piazza — the Piazza delle Sorgenti — which instead of a church or civic building contains a large open-air thermal pool fed by natural hot springs at a constant 52 degrees Celsius. The pool, measuring 49 by 29 metres and built to its current form in the sixteenth century under the Medici, has been a therapeutic and social gathering point since at least the Roman period; traces of Roman baths have been found beneath the piazza. The village sits in the Val d'Orcia in Siena Province, a UNESCO World Heritage landscape of rolling clay hills, cypress avenues, and medieval towers. The thermal water flows from the main piazza pool over a stone lip into a cascade (the Gorello falls) below the village, dropping down a series of natural travertine terraces into the valley floor. This lower cascade area — the Parco dei Mulini — is accessible to the public and has several natural hot-spring channels and pools in the travertine rock where bathing is free of charge, in contrast to the piazza pool itself, which is a protected historic monument and not open for bathing. Several small spa establishments and resort hotels in the village and surrounding area offer managed thermal bathing in pools fed by the same spring water, available by advance booking. Bagno Vignoni appeared in Andrei Tarkovsky's 1983 film Nostalghia, a slow-motion sequence in the drained piazza pool becoming one of the most celebrated images in art cinema. The village itself is tiny; most visitors spend one to two hours here as part of a broader Val d'Orcia circuit including Pienza and San Quirico d'Orcia.