Learn about Abano Terme

Abano lies on the Venetian plain at the eastern foot of the Euganean Hills, ten kilometres from Padua, on the line where an extinct volcanic massif meets flat farmland -- which is also where the hot water comes up.

The springs were a Roman sanctuary and cure centre, Aquae Patavinae, and the town's function has never really changed -- through Venetian rule and into the twentieth century, when hotel building turned it into one of Europe's largest thermal resorts.

Abano's culture is a health culture -- treatment cycles, doctors, mud and long stays -- with the older Euganean world of monasteries, vineyards and Petrarch's hills immediately behind it.

Abano is mostly a twentieth-century hotel town -- large thermal establishments set in gardens around a central park -- with a Romanesque bell tower and the eighteenth-century Montirone surviving from before it.

Abano has a humid subtropical plain climate -- hot summers, cold foggy winters -- with the Euganean Hills providing some shelter, and a thermal season that runs regardless of the weather.