Tamerici Thermae

Located within the Pineta, the Tamerici Thermae are named after the trees of the same name that were found near the water source discovered in 1843 and owned by the Swiss Schmitz family of Livorno. They were among the entrepreneurs who dedicated themselves to the development of the Montecatini Thermae between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the thermal city was still named after the baths. Even today, Tamerici trees grow around the establishment that was once frequented by Giuseppe Verdi, Leoncavallo, Puccini, cinema stars, and those of “noble” blood.

 

A Grand Ducal decree of June 1843 granted the owners the right to sell the miraculous healing water by the flagon. As they possessed a royal license, the Schmitz began to commercialize the salty water of Tamerici, which had therapeutic and especially purgative properties. They opened a sales point in Livorno, while in Florence, the water of Tamerici was available in five pharmacies, a drugstore, and a depot of purgative waters located in via San Martino. Initially the Schmitz built two buildings, one to house the water pump, and one as a warehouse to store the flagons. In fact, cadastral sources document that in 1882, the buildings consisted of the courtyard and the warehouse, while in 1903, the complex was made up of modest structures that housed the spring, a hall, a study, the warehouses, and the courtyard. The family's business diversified: on the one hand, the healing waters that were both bottled and later administered on-site, and on the other hand, the production of salt for which the Salt Pavilion was built in Montecatini in 1903.

 

The Schmitz remained the owners of the "baths" until April 2, 1902, when the New Baths Society founded by Pietro Baragiola purchased the facility.

In 1906, Giulio Bernardini and Ugo Giusti were commissioned to modernize the building, and in 1909, reconstruction work began, which lasted until 1911. The decorations, furnishings, and sculptures were installed at different times.

The facility was reborn under the sign of eclecticism. What strikes the most is the variety of architectural styles: Arab, Spanish, Renaissance, and Medieval. Architects Giulio Bernardini and Ugo Giusti opened a garden entrance worthy of a castle, featuring a porch and columns, a graceful pastiche of barbaric, Moorish, and Byzantine decorations to delight the wealthy patrons. For the decoration of the new complex, Galileo Chini was called upon, who had already left his mark on the thermal city in 1904 by decorating the ceiling of the Grand Hotel La Pace's ballroom, the now-destroyed Palace Theatre café, and the facade of the Tamerici Pavilion. At Tamerici, Chini was working as a representative of Ceramic Manufacture Fornaci San Lorenzo - founded in 1906 by him and his cousin Chino, after the experience conducted together with the direction of the Art Ceramic Manufacture - as explicitly readable still on one of the tiles of the external Fonte Giulia, near the porch, and still on a stained-glass window with the fanciful heraldic emblem of the Schmitz family that also appeared on the seal of the for-sale flagons of water, covered with paper on which the circular inscription "Polla delle Tamerici a Monte-Catini" was printed. For the new Tamerici thermae, the Tuscan artist created frescoes and stained-glass windows, ceramics, skylights, polychrome majolica floors and panels with an exotic taste and astonishing brilliance, developing in a very personal way the aquatic symbolism.
Although splendid and magical as a whole, the building, no longer active for treatments today, deserves a careful look for the Fireplace Hall and the “Mescita” Hall, and externally, the large porch and the Fonte Giulia.
In the Mescita Hall, the room where the water was administered to the patients, Chini reached the peak of his creativity. The decoration of the environment is characterized by decorative elements of a geometric nature and by the two precious benches made of glazed stoneware, supported by stylized lion protomes, which recall the iconography of Chinese dragons that Chini would later have the opportunity to observe firsthand in Siam, as a guest at the court of Rama VI from 1911 to 1913. In the background, the majolica panels with cherubs, a clear reference to both the cherubs created for the Sala della Giovane Etruria at the Milan International Exhibition of 1906 and the panels for the Sala del Sogno at the Venice Biennale of 1907.

The decoration on the floor of the room shows, among spiral-shaped branches, the coat of arms of the Schmitz family, birds and fish with bizarre shapes, and a plethora of stylized elements of clear Secessionist derivation, spirals, triangles, waves, volute and broken line motifs. The brilliance of the ceramics - which recalls the brilliance of the water and its purifying powers - makes this room extremely suggestive.

 

Bernardini also designed a garden for this facility, with partially raised flower beds, paths, tall trees, and ornamental shrubs. Some of the furnishings of the small park - including the temple-shaped berceau with six marble columns, two staircases, columns with statues, and a wrought-iron dome that dominates the garden from a small promontory - have a particular origin: they come from Villa La Capponcina in Florence, inhabited by Gabriele d'Annunzio, who was forced to sell numerous objects following one of his bankruptcies.

In the vicinity of the berceau, the Fountain of the Naiads by Mario Rutelli (1859-1941) was placed in the 1930s, reproducing a miniature of the one the sculptor made for Piazza dell'Esedra in Rome. Another famous fountain, decorated with a cherub and a frog, and called the Romanelli Fountain, is located inside the building, in what was the storage for the flagons full of the precious salty water that had been flowing from the marshy subsoil since ancient times and was now embellished with coats of arms, mounted cartouches, and a painted tympanum with two proud angels supporting a cartouche with the date 1910.