After spending a long weekend in Milan with Scott and our friends, I headed off alone to visit a friend in Abano Terme, a small spa town near Padua (Padova in Italian). Abano is relatively new for an Italian town, as it was mainly built up in the 50s and 60s, when having oneself wrapped in mud was the hip thing to do.
My friend happens to own one of the many spa hotels in the town, the Hotel Universal Terme. It’s a grand, old-fashioned place that makes you feel like you’ve gone back in time from the second you walk through the door (this is what the clients want, he tells me).
The exception to this old-fashioned feel is the spa, which has recently been re-done and looks like some stylish Manhattan oasis. The spa offers all the usual treatments (massages and the like), but its specialty is fango maturo, or mature mud. The mud is harvested from a nearby lake and then mixed with thermal water and aged in tanks to make a certain kind of algae grow. This mature mud has magical powers of some sort, and people get up extra early in the morning just to be treated with it. After mud is applied all over your body, you are wrapped up in cloth and then several blankets, and then left in your cocoon to sweat out anything and everything that ails you.
I’m not a terribly big fan of sweating, but I really wanted to try out some of this mud, so I had a hand treatment. Three days later, there’s still mud under my fingernails, but boy do my joints feel good. I also availed myself of the hotel’s indoor and outdoor thermal baths, which felt fabulous in contrast with the cool autumn air.
When my friend was able to get away from his busy job, we did some exploring around Abano. One afternoon we took a bike ride through the beautiful countryside to an abbey (pictured above). The evenings were passed eating delicious Italian food, one night at a pizzeria in Padua and the other at a trattoria in Vicenza. Yum!
