Postcard from Fiuggi

INSPIRATION | CABANA TRAVEL | WORLD OF CABANA

In the hills of Lazio, just an hour from Rome, discover the magic of Fiuggi, a rolling landscape steeped in papal history, a cinematic legend, and the producer of the most famous (and delicious) drinking water in Italy. Sophie Goodwin leaves feeling throughly cleansed. 

BY SOPHIE GOODWIN | CABANA TRAVEL | 5 JULY 2026

Palazzo Fiuggi was built to be the grandest hotel in Europe.

There is a particular kind of Italian landscape that doesn’t make it onto the Instagram grid of Tuscany’s burnished ochres and Amalfi’s vertiginous drama: the wild, knotty, saturated hills of Lazio, where the Ernici mountains rise steeply from the old Papal States and the air smells of pine resin. Fiuggi sits at the heart of this territory, 700m above sea level in the province of Frosinone, an hour south-east of Rome by car and several centuries removed from it in spirit.

The town’s fame rests on a single, extraordinary resource: its spring water. Pope Boniface VIII claimed his kidney stones were healed by Fiuggi’s mineral springs as early as the 14th century. Two centuries later, Michelangelo offered his endorsement, writing in a letter of 1549 that the water had cured him of what he called, ’the only kind of stone I couldn’t love’. The pope’s accounting records document over 187 payments for the transportation of water from Fiuggi to Rome. The town’s name, originally Anticoli di Campagna, was eventually changed in honor of its greatest asset, while the springs still bear their medieval names.

In the early 20th century, Palazzo Fiuggi was the most fashionable congregation spot.

Into this landscape, in 1913, rose a majestic Art Nouveau style building: Palazzo Fiuggi, built to be the grandest hotel in Europe and the first hotel on the continent with a swimming pool. In the early 20th century it became the most fashionable congregation point for the doyens of political, scientific, and cultural life — Pablo Picasso, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Guglielmo Marconi, Eleonora Duse and Enrico Caruso among them. In 1914, King Vittorio Emanuele III stayed here with his entire family, and it was at the Palazzo that he signed the deed sanctioning Italy’s entry into the First World War.

Following a €30m restoration under the direction of Lorenzo Giannuzzi, the Palazzo has been relaunched as a full-spectrum medical wellness retreat: serious in its ambitions, spectacular in its setting, and rather wonderful in the way it wears both qualities simultaneously. The 102 rooms, all overlooking Fiuggi and the private eight-hectare park, are furnished with Carrara marble, original parquet, Liberty windows and Murano chandeliers. The frescoes and trompe l’oeil have been painstakingly preserved.

The medical programmes here are built around the Palazzo Fiuggi Method: an integration of advanced Western diagnostics with more contemplative disciplines, overseen by a resident medical team. Every programme begins with a comprehensive assessment and concludes with a post-residence concierge to continue the work at home.

The real stand out, however, is the unrivalled dining experience, created by Heinz Beck, the three-Michelin-star chef whose Roman restaurant La Pergola is among the finest in Italy. The food philosophy is that nourishment and medicine are the same thing, approached with equal rigour. The menus are extraordinary and the flavors unexpected but seamless, anti-inflammatory and easy to digest. Each dish is meticulously presented and the menu is locally sourced, entirely seasonal, and entirely bespoke.

The spa is a jewel too. Fiuggi’s therapeutic spring water is woven through every programme: incorporated into the Thalasso pools, used in detox protocols and offered as drinking water. After a few days of drinking it in earnest, one begins to understand why Michelangelo made such a fuss. The Roman Therme, inspired by ancient bathing culture, provides something more sybaritic: heated pools, steamroom and the infrared sauna.

Palazzo Fiuggi represents a rare meeting of architectural and historical significance with medical programming that actually delivers; and the sense of spirituality seeping into the pores of the building from the surrounding area only adds to the unique sense of healing. I left feeling wildly content, and balanced, and clean from the inside out.

Beyond the Palazzo, the surrounding Lazio countryside rewards proper exploration and is richer, stranger and far less visited than almost anywhere else within easy reach of Rome. The Certosa di Trisulti, 40 minutes by car towards the Abruzzo border, is among the great overlooked monuments of central Italy. Its name derives from the Latin tres saltibus — three leaps — describing an ancient 12th century castle that once commanded the passes towards Abruzzo, Rome and the southern reaches of the Papal States.

Pope Innocent III assigned the site’s primitive Benedictine abbey to the Carthusian monks in 1204, and a complex was built, including the church of San Bartolomeo, consecrated in 1211. What makes Trisulti remarkable, beyond the sheer drama of its mountain setting, is the pharmacy. The 18th century farmacia was where the monks produced medicines and liqueurs, its interior surviving intact: Victorian display cases, apothecary jars, wooden cupboards housing boxes for medicinal herbs, and extraordinary late 18th century Pompeian-style decorations by painter Giacomo Manco.

Archival images of Palazzo Fiuggi.

The Giardino di Ninfa, an hour to the south-west towards the Pontine plain, operates on a different emotional register altogether. Built on the ruins of the medieval town of Ninfa, it has been classified as one of the most beautiful and romantic gardens in the world, and declared a Natural Monument by the Lazio Region. The town itself was destroyed in the 14th century and for centuries lay as a ghost settlement slowly consumed by the landscape.

In the early 1920s, Gelasio Caetani and his English-born mother Ada Bootle Wilbraham began to clear the site, laying out a garden in the Anglo-Saxon romantic style, planting the first cypresses, holm oaks, beeches, and roses. The garden passed through three more generations of Caetani women, each adding species and sensibility, until the last heir, Lelia, a painter, tended it like a large canvas, combining colors and encouraging natural growth, banning chemical herbicides entirely. Virginia Woolf, Truman Capote, Ungaretti and Moravia all found inspiration here. It opens on selected days from March to November; booking in advance is non-negotiable.

From the medieval to the cinematic: no visit to this part of Lazio is complete without a pilgrimage to Cinecittà, on Rome’s south-eastern edge. Founded in 1937 by Benito Mussolini under the slogan Il cinema è l’arma più forte, ’cinema is the most powerful weapon’, the studios were inaugurated as the most ambitious film production complex in Europe. The propaganda machine became something more interesting in the postwar years, when American tax arrangements made it advantageous for Hollywood to film in Italy, and Cinecittà acquired its most enduring nickname: Hollywood on the Tiber.

More than 3,000 films have been shot here, including Roman Holiday, Ben-Hur, Cleopatra and Martin Scorcese's Gangs of New York. Fellini, who made almost everything here, called it home. The studio tour and permanent exhibition — costumes, sets, production photographs, Anita Ekberg’s dress from La Dolce Vita — is one of the more transporting experiences in Rome, not least for the reconstruction of ancient Rome that still stands on the lot, built for the HBO series and still in use today.