Terme Ischia 2025: The Volcanic Island Spa Experience Complete Guide

How the ancient Greeks founded a colony on Ischia specifically for its volcanic thermal resources — and why Pythagoras had a thermal spa theory

Ischia (the ancient Pithecusae — the Greek name from the word for "monkey," reflecting the island's pre-Greek population of Etruscan terramare people, or alternatively from "pithekos" meaning "jar" — a reference to the island's wine jar production) was the site of the earliest known Greek colonial settlement in the western Mediterranean (Euboean Greeks from Chalcis and Eretria established a colony at Lacco Ameno approximately 770-750 BC — 20-50 years before the founding of Cumae on the mainland, which was previously considered the earliest western Greek colony). The thermal resource exploitation: the ancient Pithecusae settlement at Lacco Ameno is positioned directly above the Nitrodi thermal springs (the radioactive iron-bicarbonate springs that emerge at 20°C — cool enough to bathe in directly, without dilution, which the higher-temperature Citara springs are not). The Lacco Ameno Nitrodi sanctuary (the Roman-period votive deposit at the Nitrodi spring, documented archaeologically) demonstrates that the thermal springs were already being used as a sacred and healing site by the Hellenistic period. The Pythagorean connection: Pythagoras (who established his philosophical school at Croton in Calabria in approximately 530 BC) had a specific theory of thermal water — the "pneuma" (the warm vital principle that animated living things) was concentrated in thermal water, which was therefore directly beneficial to human health. The Pythagorean thermal water theory is the first systematic Western attempt to explain the health benefits of hot springs in natural philosophical rather than divine terms.