Michele Gaetano Livi - Doctor

We have information about the “learned” doctor from Montecatini Michele Gaetano Livi from Dr. Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti in his Reports of some trips made in different parts of Tuscany... (Florence 1751).

Livi wrote Observations and experiences of the Baths of Montecatini in Val di Nievole in 1772, a report intended for the Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo of Tuscany that Targioni-Tozzetti tells us was published by Alessandro Bicchierai (Lastra a Signa, 1734 - 1797) in his Dei Bagni di Montecatini.

Michele Gaetano Livi did a lot to promote the use of the waters of Montecatini based on his own practical observations and in the report he describes extensively the benefits produced by each spring.

It is thanks to him that the waters of Rinfresco, forgotten, began to be reused for various illnesses. He gave them the name of “nefritic” while he called those of Tettuccio “dysenteric” on the basis of their effects.

In his Observations the doctor then dwells on the “methods to be followed in bathing, or in passing the waters of Montecatini, so that they can be effective and safe in their results”, and “since true Chemistry was unknown”, comparative tests with waters other than those of his Baths are useless to understand their composition and “the sea salt found there” leads Livi to presume that the waters of Montecatini “come from the sea passing through the veins of the earth”, a theory, Targioni-Tozzetti states, now outdated thanks to “modern geognostic knowledge”.

On the other hand, Livi’s intuition communicated to the Grand Duke to exploit for therapeutic purposes the vapours that came from a spring in the “municipality of Monsummano, at the foot of the mountain”, an intuition also taken up a few years later by Alessandro Bicchierai, was good.

But only in 1849 was the cave with the surprising hot vapors discovered by chance by workers working in a lime quarry, immediately exploited for commercial purposes by the owner of the place, Cav. Domenico Giusti, father of the poet Giuseppe, from whom it took the name of 'Grotta Giusti'.

The face of Michele Gaetano Livi is depicted in one of the eight medallions in Robbia style that adorn the portico of the Terme Excelsior, alongside other figures who have positively marked the history of the spa town such as the grand ducal architect Gaspero Maria Paoletti, Alessandro Bicchierai, the poet Giuseppe Giusti, Ugolino Da Montecatini, the doctors Fedele Fedeli and Pompeo della Barba and the geologist Paolo Savi (LINK TO SCHEDA).