Lying on the bottom of the large Roman 'vasca' or pool, the young and very beautiful Ephebe seems to be sleeping. Next to him is Hygeia (Igea), the goddess of health who was the daughter or wife of Asclepius, with a serpent curled on her arm. A bit farther away, also partly submerged, you can see Apollo, and then other divinities, matrons, youths, and emperors.
Protected for 2,300 years by the mud and boiling water of the sacred pools, a never-before-seen votive array has re-emerged from the excavations at San Casciano dei Bagni, in Tuscany, with over 24 extremely finely wrought bronze statues, five of them almost one metre tall, all complete and in a perfect state of preservation.
It's an "absolutely unique" treasure trove, he underscores, which has been accompanied by an incredible quantity of inscriptions in Etruscan and Latin as well as thousands of coins and a series of equally interesting plant offerings.
"The layering of different civilizations is a unique feature of Italian culture," enthuses the head of the Collegio Romano.
"It's the most important discovery since the Riace Bronzes and is certainly one of the most significant discovery of bronzes ever made in the history of the ancient Mediterranean," says, beside him, the ministry's director general of museums, Massimo Osanna, who has just approved the purchase of the 16th century palazzo that will house the marvels yielded by the Great Bath in the village of San Casciano, a museum which will be flanked in the future by a full-blown archaeological park.
Luigi La Rocca, general director for Archaeology, shares their enthusiasm and stresses "the importance of the method used in this excavation", which as was the case of the most recent discoveries at Pompeii, also here saw the involvement of "specialists from all disciplines, from architects to geologists, and from archaeo-botanists to experts in epigraphy and numismatics".
Fashioned in all likelihood by local craftsmen, the 24 statues that have just been found can be dated between the second century BC and the first century AD, explains Tabolli, speaking alongside the field director Emanuele Mariotti and Ada Salvi from the Superintendency.
The shrine, with its bubbling hot pools, its sloping terraces, its fountains, and its altars, existed at least from the third century BC and remained active until the fifth century AD, Tabolli says, when in Christian times it was shut down but not destroyed, its pools sealed with heavy stone pillars, and the divinities entrusted respectfully to the water.
It is also for this reason that, having removed that covering, the archaeologists found themselves looking at a still-intact treasure trove, in effect "the greatest store of statues from ancient Italy and in any case the only one whose context we can wholly reconstruct," says Tabolli.
Partly arranged on the branches of a huge tree trunk set into the bottom of the pool, and in many cases covered with inscriptions, the statues, like the countless votive offerings, came from the great families of the local area and beyond, members of the elites of the Etruscan and the Roman worlds, landowners, local lords, affluent classes from Rome and indeed also emperors.
Here, surprisingly, the Etruscan language appears to have survived much longer than what has hitherto been assumed, and Etruscan knowledge in the medical field appears to have been recognized and accepted in the Roman era too.
In short, it is a great shrine that appears to recount itself as a unique place for the ancients too, a sort of a bubble of peace, if you think, as Tabolli explains, "that even in historical epochs in which the most awful conflicts were raging outside, inside these pools and on these altars the two worlds, the Etruscan and Roman ones, appear to have co-existed without problems".(ANSA).
The village of San Casciano dei Bagni, in Tuscany's lush Sienese countryside, is widely seen as one of Italy's top hot spring destinations, a place where open-air spa lovers and thermal pilgrims have come to float in natural bubbly waters for over two thousand years.
San Casciano's modern-day facilities are just a few feet from an ancient site that is currently the focus of an excavation effort. These thermal baths are a network of holy pools built by the pre-Italic Etruscan people as early as the 4th century BC, and later made more lavish by the ancient Romans, during an era when health and faith were deeply intertwined.
San Casciano is a geothermal hub with forty hot springs, six connected to the thermal sanctuary. The Etruscan picked this location to utilize the therapeutic power of the water's chemical properties - it is rich in minerals such as calcium and magnesium, as well as chloride and sulfates.
Hundreds of gold, silver, orichalcum, and bronze coins, a bronze putto, a marble relief of a bull’s head, five bronze votive figurines, miniature lamps, a bronze foil belt, and other religious offerings were found during excavations this summer in San Casciano Dei Bagni, establishing the baths as a particularly rich religious sanctuary beyond their significance as a thermal resort.
The first civilization to construct facilities for thermal waters was the Etruscans, but the Romans, who were real aficionados of thermal baths, were in charge when the curative powers of these waters first attracted widespread attention, as shown by the abundance of archaeological artifacts in the region.
The hot springs at San Casciano Dei Bagni have been in continuous use since the Etruscans invaded the area. The thermal pools were used as an open-air bath adjacent to the remains of the Roman spa built here during the Augustus period. It was discovered during excavations carried out between July and October last year, in a muddy garden adjacent to the spring, 20 meters south of the pools. They unearthed a section of a multi-layer Roman sanctuary built in the Augustan era (between 27 BC and 14 AD) that contained three altars dedicated to Apollo, Isis, and Fortuna Primigenia respectively and a marble statue of Hygieia. Inscriptions honor Apollo as the god of healing. A wall of massive, well-cut blocks beneath the Augustan-period shrine shows that it was erected over a much older holy site, potentially going back to the Hellenistic era, and maybe even earlier Etruscan origin.
In the first century, a fire severely destroyed the sanctuary; it was afterward repaired and enlarged. Around the end of the second century, the altars were placed on the edge of the great bath. The sanctuary was rebuilt in the early fourth century, with a few tiny additions, but by the end of the century, the previous sanctuary had been destroyed. Votive gifts, including the figure of Hygieia, were placed on horizontal altars and columns. This was possibly connected to the area’s Christianization.
