Il Rinfresco

“Half a mile from the Pistoiese road, I came across a kind of well, round in shape, which is a bath that one could not enter comfortably, and is called the Tondo bath. The water that comes out of it is moderately hot and has a salty taste [...] This bath is ruined by the carelessness of those of the place, who do not think much about their own interest”.

Thus in 1760 Dr. Bartolomeo Mesny, court physician and director of military hospitals in Tuscany, described in his diary the Rinfresco water bath, a source already known in the fourteenth century with the name of Bagnolo or Bagno Tondo and later of Bagno Mediceo, but more commonly Rinfresco, “.. 400 steps away”, again according to the doctor, “from the Tettuccio”.

The conditions of the Bath did not improve even in the following years, remaining outside the planning work of the new spa town created by Pietro Leopoldo Grand Duke of Tuscany.

In the early 1780s, the Grand Duke granted the entire Montecatini Baths complex as a perpetual and free gift to the Cassinesi Monks of the Badia of Florence, who at the time were known to be excellent administrators.

It was they, a decade later and precisely in 1795, who entrusted the young architect Giuseppe Manetti (Florence 1761-Florence 1817) with the creation of a project to build the new spa and remedy the semi-abandonment situation in which the Baths found themselves, despite the fact that its water had been praised for many centuries for its diuretic and anti-calculian action.

A student of Gasparo Maria Paoletti and his successor, the twenty-four-year-old Manetti intervened on the simple original structure consisting of a large enneagonal pool covered by a pavilion and divided by a plank to separate the men from the women, of which a drawing from 1784 remains (PLATE XIV) part of the “Piante dello Scrittoio delle Regie Possessioni” Fund and preserved in the State Archives of Florence. And he replaced it with a building that was intended to recall a pagan temple in the middle of a forest: on the façade it featured a sort of pronaos that was to be accessed via a double-flight staircase that was never built.

In fact, the project underwent several changes along the way. And, once completed, it ended up not deviating from the previous Paoletti themes. However, the new construction was equipped with bathrooms for both sexes and a swimming pool.

About a century later, Maestro Giuseppe Verdi showed a special predilection for this Establishment and praised its water, drinking it every afternoon with religious faith.

As part of the urban planning of the spa complex and the architectural reinterpretation of all the factories and treatment facilities, a task he received in 1916 from the Società delle Regie e Nuove Terme di Montecatini, of which he had become director of the Technical Office, Ugo Giovannozzi also intervenes in Il Rinfresco.

The drawings, dated 1918, envisaged a temple on the façade with four columns and a triangular pediment decorated with a bas-relief (identical to that of the Terme Leopoldine) and an exedra on the back showing the new crater.

However, the project was modified several times during construction but the engineer never abandoned Manetti's original idea of ​​imitating an ancient place of worship in the middle of a forest.

In fact, the final version of the new building appears as a small square-plan temple with the original colonnaded façade similar to a pronaos repeated on the other three sides of the building, a solution that allowed the engineer to perfectly interpenetrate architecture and nature.

The internal walls are characterized by graffito paintings with seaside depictions created by Ezio Giovannozzi.

At the center of the pavilion, the emanatory of the spring which, although hexagonal rather than dodecagonal, faithfully responds to the project designed by Ugo Giovannozzi for the Tettuccio crater which was replaced by the “Fontana dei Coccodrilli” by Sirio Tofanari.