The Birth of Spa Tourism

From cure to holiday

Spa tourism in Casamicciola did not appear overnight. Over three centuries, between the 17th and 19th centuries, the town slowly changed from a place of healing, where people came out of necessity, into a destination chosen for pleasure, health and society life. At the centre of this story is Piazza Bagni, which grew up around the Gurgitello spring.

The 17th century: cures for the poor

In 1604 the governors of the Pio Monte della Misericordia, a Neapolitan charitable institution, decided to build baths and a house for the sick poor in Casamicciola. The first season of treatment was held in July 1605, for 25 patients; as the house was not yet ready, they were lodged in a rented inn. Completed in 1606 and enlarged several times, the hospice became the island's first major centre of thermal care, linked to a network of baths and sweat rooms run by the institution in other parts of Ischia too. In 1741 the Pio Monte was caring for more than four hundred patients. The full story is told in The Pio Monte and Thermal Care for the Poor.

The 18th century: the nobility arrives

Alongside the cures for the poor, spa visits by the wealthy grew too. According to the inscriptions recorded at the Antiche Terme Belliazzi, in 1698 Andrea d'Avalos had the Gurgitello bath rebuilt to offer its treatments to the nobility, and in 1717 Cardinal Michelangelo Conti, the future Pope Innocent XIII, took a course of baths and mud treatments there. Around 1735 Francesco Buonocore, the court's chief physician, built a lodge by the Lago dei Bagni, in today's Ischia Porto, to receive the European nobility: Ferdinand IV was the first Bourbon to stay there, and the residence later became a royal lodge.

The 19th century: villas, artists and travellers

By the early 19th century holidays in Casamicciola had become popular with the aristocracy and the upper middle class. Between 1815 and 1817 Domenico Barbaja, the celebrated impresario of the Teatro di San Carlo, bought a villa in the Rostinale area; in the summer of 1817 his guest there was Gioachino Rossini, who in a letter to his mother called Ischia a dull place, while admitting that he had begun writing Armida. In 1820 the poet Alphonse de Lamartine rented a small villa at La Sentinella.

Guidebooks and illustrated periodicals did the rest: Giovan Battista De Ferrari's Nuova guida di Napoli (New Guide to Naples) of 1826 was among the first to describe Ischia in Italian and English, while in the 1830s and 1840s Neapolitan magazines such as the Omnibus pittoresco and the Poliorama pittoresco presented Casamicciola's villas and hotels to an ever wider middle-class readership. In 1856 the new establishment commissioned by Ferdinand II, now the Antiche Terme Belliazzi, opened over the Gurgitello.

Towards the spa resort

When Giuseppe D'Ascia published his Storia dell'isola d'Ischia (History of the Island of Ischia) in 1867, the island's first true monographic guide, Casamicciola already had numerous hotels and villas. The European spa resort described in Casamicciola, a European Spa Resort had been born.

Where it is

To retrace this story, start from Piazza Bagni, in the central part of the town, about ten minutes' walk from the harbour, and climb towards La Sentinella, where villas and hotels once stood.