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By Frances Mayes

Editor's note: In the excerpt below, Frances Mayes recounts a day's excursion with her husband, Ed, from their home in the Tuscan hilltown of Cortona.

April 14, 1999 | Ed is limping from a stone bruise. He leapt when his hoe suddenly disturbed a snake. His foot came down on a jagged rock. "What kind?" I asked.

"A very snaky-looking snake. Scared hell out of me. We were eye-to-eye." He's rubbing his foot with lotion.

"Let's go take the cure. We can be there by four."

"Then we can go on to Pienza for dinner. I'd like to drive up to Montechiello, too. We've never been there."

Bagno Vignoni, the tiny hilltop town near San Quirico d'Orcia, and within sight of the castle on top of Rocca d'Orcia, is built around a large thermal pool where the Medicis used to soak themselves. Where the central piazza is located in most towns, the pool (no longer used) reflects tumbling plumbago, tawny stone houses and stone arcades. Not much is going on in Bagno Vignoni. Right behind the village, a hot stream runs downhill, through a travertine ditch. On either side you can sit down and soak your feet just as Lorenzo il Magnifico did in 1490.

When I first started spending summers here, I read in an Italian newspaper a heated debate over whether or not health insurance should continue to cover yearly sojourns to spas and thermal springs, a practice many Italians take as a birthright. I had been to Chianciano Terme and had seen people clutching their livers while sipping small glasses of water.They otherwise looked tan and fit. I glimpsed tanks where various body parts or the whole corpo could be immersed for the absorption of the healing properties of local waters. I've heard workers at our house discuss the merits of various waters as though they were discussing wine. Italians are great connoisseurs of the plainest elixir of all. I see them at various roadside springs filling demijohns. Water is not just water; it has properties.

My grandmother used to take the sulphur waters for a week at White Springs, Florida, down near the Sewanee River. I was deeply bored and considered her a holdover from Victorian times. I only accompanied her so that I could swim in the cold black springs, emerging from the water smelling something like an old Easter egg. She waved from the third latticed balcony around the spring, a small paper cup of the odorous water in her other hand.

I did not expect to be drawn into this passion. Then I went to Bagno Vignoni. I converted. Ed's stone bruise takes us now but we must go at least once a year.

"Her dogs are barking," my aunt would say when we saw a woman whose feet had swollen over the edges of her pumps. After a few weeks of hauling stone, erecting trellises, and navigating stony streets, my dogs, too, are barking. We like to arrive very early, before anyone has revealed their work-torn, ailing, sometimes frightening feet. We're late today. I take off my sandals, and slowly lower my own miserable feet into the running water. Ed plunges his to the bottom.Then we notice a man with a red, red nose paring his yellow-talon toenails into the water. He must not have cut them for months. We stare as his big toenail, like a curl of wax, falls into the water. We move upstream from him.

At fifty-two degrees Celsius, the shock of hot water on a hot day is intense. Ed's size twelves magnify through the water next to my long rabbit feet. Sometimes the water feels merely warm. Rubbing my heels against the smooth travertine streambed, I concentrate on the invisible but potent minerals which are starting to soothe blisters, relax tendons, muscles, even purify nails and skin. Ed says his purple bruise is fading, fading. The water starts to feel as though it's swirling through my feet. When I close my eyes, only my feet seem to exist.

After twenty minutes, I'm back in my sandals, toes glowing lobster-red. Ed slides on his espadrilles under water and squashes out. Cured.

This is the strange part. Walking back into town for a strawberry gelato, not only do I feel a surge of euphoria, my feet feel as if they could levitate. Everyday Italian life continues to astound me. What is in these Italian waters?

Next page | A town tarted up with geraniums