Spa & Wellness

Nine metres down, twelve degrees, and nobody playing music at you.

The cellars were cut into the hill in 1908 to hold wine at twelve degrees. They hold the water at thirty and the air at nineteen now, and not one stone has been faced over. There is no soundtrack down there because you can hear the lake through the rock.

Residents only· Open all night· No music

The vault at six in the morning · June

Nine metres down

It was a wine cellar for a hundred and eight years.

Emilio had it cut into the hill in 1908 for one reason: nine metres inside rock, the temperature does not move. It held about four thousand bottles until 1998, and after that it held very little at all.

When it was opened up again in 2017 there was a foot of silt on the floor, eleven empty racks and one bottle nobody has yet been brave enough to open. The stone underneath was perfect.

Nothing has been clad, tiled or lined since. What you swim in is the room Emilio’s masons cut, with water in it.

9 mBelow the terrace

1908Cut by hand, in eleven months

19°Air, all year, unheated and uncooled

4,000Bottles, until 1998

Survey section, 2017 · redrawn

The water

Four temperatures, and one of them is unpleasant.

Everything down there is one of four numbers. Three of them are comfortable. The fourth is at the far end of the room and takes about eight seconds, if you can manage eight.

0° 50°

8°

19°

30°

44°

8° The cold A stone trough at the far end, fed from the hill. Eight seconds is enough. Nobody has managed a minute, Nadia included.

19° The air The room itself, never heated and never cooled. The same in February as in August, because nine metres of rock does not care.

30° The pool Eighteen metres end to end under the vault. Warm enough to stay in for an hour, not warm enough to fall asleep.

44° The steam And a hundred per cent humidity. Cut straight into the rock rather than built as a box inside it, which is why it smells of stone.

Nothing is chlorinated. The pool runs on ozone and an ultraviolet lamp that is changed every March, the filters are cleaned on Mondays, and the water smells of nothing at all.

Treatments

Four of them, with the prices next to them.

Most spa lists run to thirty items, and most of those are the same treatment with a different flower in the title. There are four here.

The long one

90 minutes

€180

Whatever Nadia decides you need once she has had a look at you. Most people go under at about forty minutes and nobody wakes them.

The short one

50 minutes

€120

The same thing with less of it. Book this if you are here two nights and would like the afternoon back afterwards.

The one after a walk

40 minutes

€95

Calves, feet and lower back, and nothing else. Invented for a guest who came down off Monte Crocione and could not get his boots off.

Four hands

60 minutes

€260

Two therapists, one of you, and no conversation whatsoever. It is the one we would choose.

There is no menu beyond these. If you want something that is not on it, ask Nadia nineteen years in, she will either do it or tell you she cannot, and she is fairly direct about which.