Saturnia, Tuscany

Ciao!


Today I visited the hot springs at Saturnia. I can honestly say I have never been to a place like this before, it was soooooooooooooooooooooooo cool.   ( ha ha, I meant to say it was soooooooo HOT =]  ) !!!!
Here are some little known facts about Saturnia's hot springs, ( I know, I know, I will get to the fun part soon. I promise =]. ) Saturnia is a small village in Tuscany.  It is famous for its thermal hot springs.  These springs have been around for over 2,000 years. ( amazing that the springs are still there, right!!!!!! ) The springs are heated by thermal activity, meaning volcano, and they smell of sulpher. For those of you who don't know...sulpher smells like rotton eggs. The village itself was built to give visitors to the springs a place to stay.  According to my friend Pier, this is one of the few natural  sites that is open to the public FOR FREE!!!! (  ha ha ha I don't think that I got the point through to you that this is a free site!!!!!!! ) Pier also believes that Saturnia is named after the roman god Saturn. Saturn is the god of harvest, very appropriate because Tuscany is full of grape and olive orchards and has been for a very, very long time. Anyway....over 2000 year old hot springs, cool right?!? 
I thought that the hot springs were unnaturally natural (funny right?) The first thing I thought when I walked in was WOW! I immediatley stripped off my clothes (no I wasn't naked.....another note for you...in Italy you need to cover up when walking to and from a pool, everybody has robes!) I had on my new bikini that my dad bought for me in California. Anyway, I stripped off and jumped in. There are a lot of different pools, some big, like a small swimming pool, some tiny, with just enough room for one person. The hot water runs down from a waterfall that you can sit under, boy is that fun, kind of like getting a really deep massage. The water flows from pool to pool and all of them are lined with round pebbles. Pier worked out that they actually start out as a small grain of sand (?) but over time all the sulpher mud (did I mention that it smelled like rotton eggs? Well it did!) covers it and then makes the grain bigger and bigger. He said if you cut one in half you can actually count the rings to see how old the "rock" is, I don't know about that, he also told me that mozzerella bufalo is made from bufflao milk, yeah right! Anyway, we were there for about 2 hours, had a great lunch of mozzerella, salami and fresh bread, then my dad, me and Pier decided to shoot down some rapids, I will post the video soon, it was like going to a water park! Then we headed back to Rome.
It took us a bit longer to get home because Pier took us to the Mediteranian seaside where we had gelatto, actually 2 gelattos, but who's counting? Great day, only I didn't get to buy my boots.......that is another story.