It’s not so much the cold but the damp that has got us this autumn and winter season at Bagni di Lucca. The seemingly perennial rainy days have turned garden walls into mossy banks and our shoulders and knees in creaking joints.

What more salubriousness then than a course of mud baths in our spa town of Bagni di Lucca?

It’s lucky when our doctor’s wife is herself a doctor and head of the medical team overseeing admittance to the thermal baths. We first got a prescription from our doctor for the mud therapy. Yesterday morning we headed for our appointment and were given the all-clear from his wife.

The baths have a long and distinguished history with such notables as Montaigne, Shelley, Heine and Puccini taking the waters here. Montaigne declared them the finest he’d come across and the most effective cure for his own complaints. Heine disported with a ballerina near the baths and departed, too, much improved in health (the little mountain cottage where they met is still there and some local vineyard tenders pointed out out to me.)

Shelley bathed in the volcanic streams springing from the thermal hill and Puccini spent a summer here composing the second act of his opera, ‘The Girl of the Golden West.’

Having stripped in readiness for the mud to be applied to my own joints I was shocked to find the mud turned out to be incredibly hot (around 40 degrees centigrade). However, I was persuaded to remain and after around twenty minutes in a mud cocoon I was led first to a shower, then to a bath and finally to a couch where my relaxation, cleanliness and relief was complete.

Emerging from the cubicle I made my way through graciously painted rooms to the bar and exited into yet another gloomy and grey day at Bagni di Lucca.

Anyway, I have to say I did feel a lot better after this muddy session; the mud seemed to work a more effective relief than the English mud I used to pick up on the rugby playing fields of my school and, therefore, I’m looking forwards to the next six sessions of this therapy.