Wild Spas of Italy

The steamy sulfur springs north of Rome may be out of Dante’s “Inferno,” but locals and pleasure-seekers find them refreshing. Bulicame is one of the natural sulfur springs that dot the province of Viterbo, near Rome. They were discovered by the Romans in the fourth century B.C.

"It's an inferno in here,” yelled a middle-aged woman as she plunged into a foul-smelling hot spring in central Italy. She wasn't the first to compare these scorching sulfur baths to Hell. In Canto XIV of “Inferno,” Dante wanders past a pool oozing with boiling red water and is reminded of these thermal spas about an hour north of Rome “whose waters are shared with prostitutes.”

Read the complete article from the New York Times