Bagni San Filippo · From Roman Origins to the Medici · Leonardo De Vegni
The Roman origins of Bagni San Filippo are noted in several historical texts, though without direct evidence. It was only in 1898 that excavations commissioned by the Ministry of Public Education confirmed the place had indeed been inhabited since antiquity.
The finds included a Roman necropolis: a curving perimeter wall enclosing eight rectangular pit-graves, furnished with a few simple red earthenware pots dated to the first and second centuries AD. Beyond the wall, around a metre deeper than the others, fourteen later graves were uncovered.
Besides the graves, coins were found from the reigns of Constantine, Domitian and Trajan, along with the remains of a dwelling with reticulated walls finished in stucco and a floor of cocciopesto.
The first written document to mention San Filippo is connected to the monastery of Abbadia San Salvatore and dates to 859. San Filippo appears with references to a parish church, a farmstead and a villa in documents of 1014, 1022, 1023, 1067 and 1085, as well as in a deed of donation in favour of the Abbot of San Salvatore, signed in December 1084.
The earliest references to the hot waters of the place are found in a bequest to the monastery of Abbadia San Salvatore, dated 1191:
«intra pleberium sancti Filippi, positum in comitatu Clusino, omne ius et actiones mihi super his competens terras videlicet et vineas, casas, aedificia, campos, prata et pascua, silvas et aquas calidas et frigidas»
Over the following centuries the life of the baths, and the succession of noble families who controlled them, is well documented. From the twelfth century the Visconti family, a branch of the Ardengheschi, held absolute dominion over various places in the Paglia valley, the Sienese Ombrone and the Orcia, Bagni San Filippo among them. From 1350 the rights over the lands and baths of San Filippo began to pass back and forth between the Visconti and Salimbeni families, who over time were frequently bound by ties of kinship and business.
One episode of particular interest is the restoration of the baths undertaken by Cosimo de' Medici in 1566. By then the baths were in poor repair, owing to the damage wrought by the war the Spanish and their Florentine allies had waged against the Sienese state — a war that ended in Siena's defeat and the passing of the old republic into Cosimo's hands.
In 1561 Cosimo expressed an interest in restoring the baths, though nothing came of it at once, not least because the matter first had to be settled with the owners. The question arose again in 1564, when — in the words of the time — the waters had been lost, and part of the building where the spouts had stood was exposed, so that they could not easily be rebuilt and no longer gave the benefit they once had.
Cosimo then resolved to buy back the baths — ownership of which passed to the state, it seems, as early as 1565 — and to undertake the works, which the experts reckoned would come to 130 gold scudi; the annual income was put at 50 scudi, to which was added the yield of a sulphur mine included in the property. In the winter of 1565–66 — since in summer it was impossible to work for the heat and the fumes of the waters — an attempt was made to recover the water, whose source had sunk below the existing bath-houses, until at last it was judged wiser, rather than chase the old source, to use the new one, which meant rebuilding the baths further down the valley, near the houses of the village.
For a sense of the life led at the Sienese thermal resorts, the most important source is the statute of the commune of Siena, whose vernacular version dates from the early fourteenth century. These notes are enough to show that life at the baths was understood as a kind of holiday, given over to leisure, and a place where friendships were struck up more easily. Almost all the authors who have written on the Sienese baths dwell on this sense of freedom and gaiety that marked a stay at the springs.
It is well known that the young Catherine of Siena was taken to the baths of Vignoni in the hope of dissuading her from her resolve to become a nun. In his play La Mandragola, Machiavelli gives Callimaco — eager to win the beautiful Lucrezia — some telling lines on the opportunities a stay at the baths might afford:
«Che è a me! Potrebbe quel luogo farla diventare d'un'altra natura, perché in simili lati non si fa se non festeggiare; ed io me n'andrei là, e vi condurrei di tutte quelle ragion piaceri che io potessi, né lascerei indiretto alcuna parte di magnificentia; fare' mi familiar suo, del marito... che so io? Di cosa nasce cosa, e 'l tempo la governa.»
In La Mandragola itself, San Filippo is named among the baths recommended to Messer Nicia by his physician. The fame of the baths of San Filippo is borne out by the famous figures who came to take the waters. Pope Pius II, who suffered from arthritis, is said to have gone to the baths in the spring of 1462, but — advised against it by his doctor — chose instead to stay at the nearby Abbey of San Salvatore.
The most celebrated bather was Lorenzo the Magnificent, who, like others of the Medici family, suffered from gout; for this reason he was a great frequenter of the baths, San Filippo among them, where he first stayed in the autumn of 1484. Building works were reportedly carried out at Bagni San Filippo for Lorenzo in 1485, and again in 1490, in anticipation of a stay that duly took place that summer, the Sienese had made ready — besides the house he had occupied on earlier visits — a further dwelling able to house up to twelve people, evidently of Lorenzo's retinue.
The Medici family's fondness for Bagni San Filippo is attested too by the many members who came at various times to take the cure. Famous is the cure that Grand Duke Ferdinando II found here for a troublesome headache. A record of his stay survives in the stone tablet commissioned by Lelio Guglielmi, owner of the baths, later transcribed by various authors who have written on the springs; it was moved several times over the centuries. In the nineteenth century it was set into the façade of the new baths, and finally, in the last century, it was carried to the right of the entrance doorway of the spa hotel, where it remains today.
The state of the baths in this century was briefly described by Gherardini during his visit to the Sienese state in 1676, who confirmed that both the bath and the village houses were in poor condition; the cures, nonetheless, were highly effective and much frequented. As for the population of Bagni San Filippo, 117 inhabitants were recorded in 1645; by 1745 the two parishes together barely reached 614; and by 1833 the two combined had grown to 1,055.
Much has been written about Leonardo De Vegni, a leading figure in the culture of the later eighteenth century — a man of letters, an architect and an amateur of the natural sciences. The doctor from Chianciano was certainly something of a polymath, and Bagni San Filippo is bound to his name through the fame of the “plastic of the tartars” he devised.
The De Vegni family held some property at Bagni San Filippo, and when Leonardo — who had studied law at Bologna at his father's wish — was at last free, after his father's death in 1757, to “take up again his mathematical studies and apply them professionally to some art of design”, he went to the baths to study how the lime-depositing waters, whose effects he had so often observed, might be put to use. Within a few days he had perfected this new art, of which he gave notice to Dr Gaetano Monti, public lecturer at the university and professor of natural history at the institute of Bologna, to whom he dedicated the little volume Descrizione del Casale, e Bagni di San Filippo, published in Bologna in 1761. He wrote:
«... senz'aiuto di scarpello, o simile arnese, ottengo, quasi immediatamente dall'acqua, bassirilievi di qualunque grandezza, e di qualunque più fino intaglio, candidi, lucidi, e duri a mio piacimento, potendoli avere di tutte quelle consistenze, che abbiamo sopra notate: che sicuramente posso ampliare tale invenzione per ornati d'architettura, lapide scritte, vasche di fontane, e vasi di giardini d'opera rustica, e simili, resistenti all'intemperie dell'aria al pari d'un marmo, e che finalmente spero paterne avere ancora le statue, ed altri lavori di molto sottosquadro; ma con spesa e incomodo grave, cui non m'è piaciuto fin ora sottopormi.»
In 1766, in partnership with Girolamo Gherardini of Celle, he established a true factory of the tartars, which enjoyed various privileges from Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo, as well as a visit from him on 25 October 1769; in 1771 that partnership was dissolved and another begun with Antonio Matteucci of Siena, though it proved very short-lived.
The production of these bas-reliefs won wide fame and fortune. In the years before De Vegni's death in 1801 there were made, among others: a relief above the Porta al Sole at Chianciano, designed by him and the only one certainly still surviving; six large reliefs, after a model by Leonardo Frati, that adorned the Boboli-garden front of the Meridiana pavilion in Florence, of which every trace has been lost; and another relief on the front of the fountain De Vegni designed at Seggiano, destroyed some decades ago.
The fortunes of the “plastic of the tartars” continued well beyond De Vegni's lifetime, growing into a genuinely flourishing industry whose pieces were not only bought by visitors to the baths but exported as far as America. The process De Vegni used was set out by him in a memoir presented to the Accademia dei Fisiocritici of Siena in 1788, though not published until 1808.
De Vegni held that work produced in this way was not only of better quality than that made with the chisel, but far cheaper too. Applied to building, the technique allowed brackets and ledges to be created in a few days even where the ground fell away steeply. Of these works — which still strike anyone unaware of the waters' properties as something close to science fiction — one was destroyed some decades ago, during the building of the present spa's pool: a small round grotto hung with stalactites, a remnant of the old grain-mill works, whose image survives in Terreni's engraving as well as in the planimetric drawing of the 1823 Leopoldine land registry.
Among Leonardo De Vegni's services to Bagni San Filippo must be counted a full, documented printed history and description of the place, which remains the principal source for anyone wishing to study this area. The description is accompanied by a “topographical map of the Baths and lands of San Filippo”, the first engraved by De Vegni himself — a precious and telling source for the history of the place.
Following an imaginary journey from Campiglia towards Bagni San Filippo, the author lingers over the gypsum quarry and the crystals already noted by Pecci, before warning that, once the chestnut woods give out, “the sight of white hillocks crusted with tartar, the smoke and the disagreeable breath announce the nearness of our waters”. Here lay three or four mofettes — pockets of noxious gas, dangerous to men and beasts alike, the more so for being hard to spot.
The map takes in a stretch reaching from the hermitage of San Filippo — “forbidding for its huge crags of stone... broken here and there by a few great trees” — to the Fosso della Fonte, today called the Fosso Bianco; through the middle runs the Fosso della Rondinaia, whose presumed ancient bed De Vegni also draws. To the right of the stream, on a low hill, could be seen the remains of a round basin known as the Bollore, where one of the oldest springs rose.
Some decades later, in 1795, came the volume by Giorgio Santi, professor of natural history at the University of Pisa, which describes the area on the basis of a journey he made in August 1789. Santi, who was De Vegni's guest — his house being “the only passable one in that wretched place” — writes thus:
«Sono i Bagni di San Filippo situati a mezza salita di una collina tartarosa assai declive in vicinanza delle falde del monte chiamato il Zoccolino. Si può dire, che da questa parte qui incominci la radice del gruppo Montuoso, che costituisce il Montamiata. Il fabbricato consiste in un meschino Villaggio composto di poche casucce, ove nulla vi è, che non respiri miseria. Vi sono i Bagni, e vi è una chiesetta dedicata a San Filippo apostolo, da cui ha preso il nome il villaggio.»
From other details he gives, it appears the thermal cures were still practised, though it is not known in what building, since the old baths lay in ruins. In the then-abandoned sulphur-mine caves were found “concretions shaped like mushrooms, cauliflowers and other whimsical objects, often so beautiful they would grace any Museum of Natural History, were their extreme fragility not to make them too difficult to transport”. Santi's account closes with a detailed list of the minerals gathered on the spot and the plants observed growing along the Formone and Rondinaia streams — a scientific record that might be compared with the present state of the place to register the environmental changes since.