MENÙ:

Alessandria

Valenza

Casale M.to

Ovada

Novi Ligure

Tortona

Acqui Terme

The city of Acqui T.me (1, 2)

Home page/Acqui Terme/The city of Acqui Terme

THE CITY OF ACQUI TERME

Situated on the left bank of the Bormida, Acqui Terme is unquestionably the most elegant and touristic locality of the entire province. Lying down among collinary declivities, where the vine reigns over all the other fruits, Acqui is today not only a town of a consolidated and flourishing economy, but it is especially an international and tourist attraction for the elegance of its historical center and for the thermal baths among the most important ones in Italy for their curative capabilities.

Founded by the Liguri, Acqui rose to the dignity of municipium with the name of Aquae Statiellae as a result of the Roman victory by the consul Marcus Popilius Lenate. The town experienced in the republican and in the imperial age a remarkable economic and social growth thanks to the geographic position and to the curative power of its sulphureous mud: the arches of the aqueduct testify this past, still today emerging upon the bed of gravel of the Bormida river.

Unfortunately, if Acqui has followed the glorious days of Rome, it followed also the fall of the Empire: the barbaric invasions destroyed the wealth that it had acquired until it passed under the Longobard Dukedom and then under a committee of Charles the Great. The figure of the bishop-count, typical mixture of the temporal power and the religious power in the Middle Age, took place in Acqui in the most typical expression. The town lived a renewed splendor in the XII century when it was declared free Common and, as such, when the Emperor Frederick the Red Beard moved down to Italy, joined the Lombard League. After a long period of submission to the marquis of the Monferrato, Acqui suffered, in the course of the XVII and of the XVIII centuries, the devastations and the damages deriving from the repeated passages of the French and of the Spanish troops until it passed, in 1708, under the dominion of the Savoias and later on to the united Italy.

Page 1