Bagni di Lucca

Lucca administered the baths the way one administers an asset. The statute of 1308 regulated their use, and that of 1331 gave them a whole chapter: the vicars who stayed there in summer, from May to October, were told that inns and hotels should be well stocked with food and drink and the places kept clean, so that outsiders would be well received. It worked: from the 15th century the baths of the Val di Lima were among the most frequented in Europe, Ugolino da Montecatini described the establishments and the cures in a treatise of 1417, and from 1469 their direction was entrusted to physicians of standing. Elisa Baciocchi, Napoleon's sister, then built here one of the first spa towns on the continent; the casino came, and the English, who built their own church.

In the former Grande Albergo Le Terme, at Bagni Caldi, that season ended. Between 1941 and 1943 the village had housed some thirty Jewish refugees in private homes, and the small community had settled in; in December 1943, under German occupation, the provincial concentration camp for Jews was opened in the same building. Fifty-seven Jews brought from Castelnuovo Garfagnana were shut in there, along with others arrested in the area. A partisan attempt to free the camp came too late: on 25 January 1944 the prisoners were moved to the prisons of Florence, then to Milan, and on 6 February to Auschwitz, where almost all of them were killed.