Terme di Riccione

Riccione Terme sits a few hundred metres from the Adriatic beach, in a pine grove on viale Torino, and draws on the group of springs known as the Fonti del Beato Alessio. The operator names three of them: Isabella, the most heavily mineralised, used for chronic skin conditions and for bone and joint baths; Claudia-Riccione, of medium mineralisation, the source chosen for upper and lower airway treatments and for rhinogenic deafness; and Celestina, the lightest of the three, taken as a drinking cure. The published analysis puts all three between 14.95 and 15.35 degrees at the tap and their pH between 6.85 and 6.95, so this is a cold sulphurous water heated for use rather than a naturally hot spring. The measured hydrogen sulphide content separates them sharply, from 1.2 in Isabella to 12.6 in Claudia-Riccione.

The same water goes into the mud. Clays from the Tausano quarry at San Leo, described by the operator as abyssal clays of marine origin, are mixed with the sulphur water and then left in maturation tanks for roughly six months before use. Alongside the mud and bath therapies the centre runs inhalation and drinking cures, medical examinations and instrument tests, a physiotherapy and rehabilitation unit that works in sulphurous thermal water, and an outpatient clinic. Access to the cures requires a compulsory admission examination, and mud-bath courses additionally require an ECG no more than six months old.

The leisure side is the Percorso Termale Sensoriale in the Oasi spa: thermal pools held at several different temperatures with hydromassage, a vascular water circuit for heavy legs, a wide sheet waterfall, small grottoes with infrared heat, colour-and-scent shower routes and cascade jets for the neck and shoulders, ending in a relax room. Two hours cost 25 euro, or 15 euro for children aged 6 to 12, who must be at least six years old and accompanied by an adult. The water was first analysed in 1890 by Count Felice Pulle, then head physician of Riccione's Ceccarini hospital; the operator dates the real growth of the centre to the 1980s.