Abano Terme

Viale Delle Terme is the main pedestrian area, overlooked by gardens and refined shops, bars and restaurants, hotels and clubs. The avenue connects the historic center with the spa area, where the Montirone springs and the oldest spas located: the Todeschini, the Clock and the Trieste Victoria. There are two sites of great interest: the Cathedral of San Lorenzo and the recent Piazza del Sole e della Pace, also known as Piazza della Meridiana for the beautiful sundial designed by the aponense astronomer Salvador Condè. The Sundial-clock is made of polychrome marble and is one of the largest in Europe (3000 square meters).

Urban Thermal Park - a jewel of contemporary architecture, designed by one of the most influential architects and historians of architecture, Paolo Portoghesi, the vast complex, which fits harmoniously into the urban and architectural context of the spa town, is conceived as a single, large continuous lawn 3 km long, covered with paved lanes and cycle paths, full of plants and tall trees arranged along the avenue main. It alternates green spaces with shops, offices, cycle paths, fountains, monumental columns, and hundreds of plants that adorn the entire park.

Grand Hotel Orologio - this beautiful building was built in the 1700s by the noble Paduan family of Dondi dell Orologio, in the following century it was enlarged, and the neoclassical facade (1825) added by Giuseppe Jappelli, one of the greatest exponents of the neoclassical style in Veneto. Despite being closed for years, it remains one of the emblems of the history of Abano.

Grand Hotel Trieste & Victoria, legendary historic hotel on the pedestrian area, was built in 1911. Here was located the Italian Supreme Command during the First World War (1918) and General Armando Diaz used to stay in a first-floor apartment.

Colle del Montirone, once rich in thermal springs, still preserves stone basins with hot, steaming water. The monumental entrance to the park consists of a portal with a Corinthian colonnade. Nearby is a Doric column surmounted by a cup wrapped between the coils of a snake, designed by Giuseppe Jappelli who in 1825 celebrated the arrival of Emperor Francis I of Austria with this monument. The Civic Art Gallery at Montirone, which contains paintings, drawings, and engravings made between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, and the Municipal Gallery of Contemporary Art, home to temporary exhibitions, are housed.

The toponym Abano contains a reference to water both for the presence of the Indo-European root - "ap," and for the association with the god Aponus, which means "without pain," to protect thermal springs in the Paleovenetian and Roman ages. The origins of thermal treatments date back to the 8th century BC C. when the ancient inhabitants of the area went to the nearby sacred lake, which extended into the territory of the current Euganean Spas, to perform rituals linked to the recovery of health and drank therapeutic water from ceramic vessels. According to the legend the same Ercole who, passing through the land of Apono, founded the cult of Gerione, mysterious god, imprisoned in the bowels of the earth, who prophesied the future through a priest or a priestess, able to interpret the prophecies of the god through the thermal waters. After 49 BC a bourgeois upper class was formed of local Romanized peoples, who in imitation of the high courses of Rome gave great importance to the baths favoring the establishment of public baths and thermal establishments completely transforming the sanctuary. The ancient attendance of the baths is documented up to the whole fifth century AD C.

In the Middle Ages, the territory was occupied by the Lombards, Carolingians, and Saxons, who shook the life of these campaigns. The first official documents that offer us information on Abano date back to the 10th century. From the 12th century, the village of Abano developed as a rural center, under the bishop of Padua.

At the beginning of the modern age, the Venetian aristocracy took over the territories confiscated from the rebel Paduan nobles. In the eighteenth century the affirmation of the Enlightenment and of the "encyclopedic" interests for all knowledge and in particular for those connected to nature have made thermalism reconsider by dedicating to it a significant quantity of studies that contributed to rediscover this therapeutic practice that even if it didn't disapire, it was in fact little considered. A building renovation activity started in the Montirone area, rich in natural springs.

After the First World War, the traditional activity related to thermal treatments experienced a formidable development due to the new technological knowledge that allowed the opening of artificial wells near which many thermal establishments were built. In 1926 the private management of thermal resources passed to the system of public concessions, and thanks to this provision considerably increased the number of hotels in Abano. In the second post-war period, a welfare-type health policy developed that allowed the use of thermal therapies to a large public and consequently numerous artificial wells opened and new establishments built.