Bagno Vignoni, in the Orcia Valley, the square that not exists

We are in the Orcia Valley, a land characterized by the harsh and sweet landscapes known all over the world, under the outline of the Tentennano fortress, in Castiglione d’Orcia that seems to dominate over all. A little village, remained incredibly intact since the fourteenth century, Bagno Vignoni. But its peculiarity consists in much more. The façades of the few buildings (about ten in all), opens on a square absolutely unique, because in reality it is constituted by a large basin (49 metres length by 29 width), surrounded by a stone wall, also of the fourteenth century, and feed by the thermal waters that gush out there at the temperature of 52 degrees C. A square with a really singular sight, then, that becomes even unreal. Especially during the winter nights, when the lights of the lamps breaks down and becomes blurred in the thick fog that comes up from the hot water of the bathing-poll and stagnates among the houses creating suffused and uncertain atmospheres as we are living in a dream. Nowadays, the square does not resound again with the sniggers and the buzzing of the young descendents of the noble families of Siena that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were lodged in these houses during the summer season.

Suggestiveness that would struck all the famous travellers that, during the past centuries, came here, in Bagno Vignoni to dip in the hot and curative waters of the great square. Among them, there were Lorenzo the Magnificent, that came here apoximately in the year 1490 in the desperate attempt to relieve pain caused by the illness that strucked almost all the Medici's family: the gout. But a century before, or a bit more, here came, several times, Saint Catherine of Siena. Not of her own will, we have to admit it, but to obey her family which, adverse to her intention to take the veil, hoped that the relaxed atmosphere that then here reigned during the thermal season, among pleasure-loving ladies and gentlemen, was able to desist her from her desires. But they had no considered the tenacious character of the future saint that transformed a pleasure stay in an opportunity of penance and prayer. In fact Catherine, as they tell, enjoy herself having the bathe exactly in the point where the water came up, very hot, with the result to cause her body great sufferings. The legend tells that, still today when the circumstances are propitious, in the water you can see the bright trail that indicates the way followed by Catherine to reach the spring.

During the eighteenth century, The systematic exploitation of the waters begins when the Chigi’s family, which had obtained the right to use the thermal waters considered even miracolous for some kind of illness, built the first spa outside the perimeter of the square.

Nowadays, the great square do not receive in its hot waters the bathers any more. The silence has taken the place of the amused sniggers of the young descendents of the noble families of Siena, But the ripple of the water, the thick fog that comes out from the great basin during the night and all wants to surround and to swallow up, tell stories and legends never asleeped, tales of saints, of sieges, of loves started and finished in this square unique in the world.

An history that you can still read on the façades of the few palaces of this square, simple surfaces, with no exaggerations, but that have the name of celebrated families, as the Piccolomini, which house was made by one of the most important architects of the first Renaissance, the Rossellino. Only few buildings and the really simple façade of a Romanic church. A narrow paved road that runs around three sides of the basin. And, in the fourth side, the beautiful fifteenth-century portico with a stone tablet celebrating the good qualities of the waters. The waters of a dream.