San Giuliano Terme

The name it bears today is of 1935: before that it was Bagni San Giuliano, and before that Bagni di Pisa. The Romans already knew the waters — the first certain notice comes from Pliny the Elder, who calls them aquae pisanae — and from that age something almost incredible survives: at the Conserva di Corliano there is a terracotta fistula acquaria still working, part of the aqueduct that at the end of the first century Lucius Venuleius Montanus, patron of the Pisan colony, had built along with the baths of Pisa. The baths were first restored, in 1112, by countess Matilda of Canossa.

European fortune came with the Lorraines: from 1743 Francis Stephen made the place his summer thermal residence, and from then the Baths became known to the nobility of all Europe — Montaigne, Byron and Shelley passed through, and Shelley lived here with his household. Pietro Leopoldo then did two things. The first is the comune: on the seventeenth of June 1776 a decree of his united thirty-one small settlements into a single administration, with San Giuliano as its head. The second is the landscape: the plane trees on the avenue to Pisa, the viale Boboli — so named in homage to the Florentine gardens — the Parterre, and the Café Haus, a building of open arches on ten pillars from which one looked out over the whole plain, and into which only the guests of the baths could go. That separation, indeed, is the bitter part of the story: when the Opera Pia fenced off the thermal property to divide the bathers from the people, the bond between the townspeople and their own waters was broken. And in 1935 the establishment passed to the state pension institute, which rebuilt it for its insured, burying the old Grand-ducal Baths. Under the mountain runs the Medici aqueduct, with a cycle path that in a few kilometres takes you to Pisa: you reach the leaning tower cool and fresh, which the Pisans will appreciate.