La Bollente

Acqui Terme has one unmistakable centrepiece: a small sculpted pavilion in a public square, from which water rises already hot enough to mist the cool air. La Bollente is not a monument to a battle or a bishop but to a geological accident — a deep spring of sulphurous water that made this town famous two thousand years ago.

Why it matters

The Bollente spring is the reason Acqui Terme exists as a spa town. Roman writers already ranked the waters of Aquae Statiellae among the most valued of the ancient world, and the Bollente remains the most used source for the town's thermal establishments. The marble edicola that frames it today was built in 1879 to a design by the engineer Giovanni Ceruti, during the urban reorganisation of the quarter promoted by the municipal administration of Giuseppe Saracco. It is the city's emblem: the spring's steam is a familiar part of the city's civic landscape.

What to notice

The octagonal pavilion frames the spring and its stonework. It emerges at 74.5 degrees Celsius, whose heat rises visibly from the spring. The chemical signature is equally distinctive: a sulphurous, salso-bromo-iodic water — mineral-laden, with a marked sulphur scent that locals barely register and newcomers never forget. The surrounding square is a lesson in the town's layered history: the area was radically rebuilt between about 1870 and 1880, when the old ghetto that stood here was demolished, and nearby rises the medieval civic tower known as "the tower without foundations", given its present form in 1763 above the arch of the former Porta della Bollente.

Context and history

The spring predates every building around it. The Ligurian Statielli settled here because of the hot waters, the Romans developed bathing complexes around them, and Pliny the Elder placed Acqui's springs in the front rank of the ancient world. The current arrangement, however, is a 19th-century statement of civic pride. Between 1870 and 1880 the administration led by Giuseppe Saracco transformed this quarter, and in 1879 the engineer Giovanni Ceruti (1842–1907) provided the little eclectic tempietto that both protects the spring mouth and stages it as urban theatre. Ceruti's design has since become the shorthand image of Acqui Terme, reproduced on souvenirs and civic imagery. An old local tradition, recounted by the town's standard references, adds colour to the ritual of the water: newborns were once carried to the fountain for a brief immersion, and those who came out unscathed earned the dialect nickname "sgaientò" — scalded. Its setting also carries a difficult memory: the demolition of the medieval ghetto to open the modern square, with the new synagogue of 1888 built nearby on Via Saracco.