community was a prohibition to use the bath. The Italian doctors distinguished between _Stupha_, or hot air, and _Balneum_, or hot water baths. Rubbing and even scratching whilst bathing was recommended, and Arnaldo di Villa Nuova (1300-1366) ordered his elderly patients to be well rubbed when in the water, and to take a herb-bath four times a month. Soap, and sometimes lye, was used, and Italian soap was in great request, particularly in Germany. The hot sulphur springs of Morba had been known for centuries, and belonged to the Commune of Volterra, as is mentioned in a document of 1297. They lie some ten miles south of the old Etruscan city, in that part of the Apennines dominated by the imposing Monte Cerbole, in a region which then and now produced borax and alum. The wild desolate scenery gave rise to legends. It was said that on stormy nights a fiery chariot drawn by fiery horses rushes along the mountain side, and then with a terrific noise which drowns thunder and wind, dashes down into the valley leading to the lagoons of Larderello, which were supposed to be the mouths of hell, and disappears. After the apparition of the chariot, the jets of white sulphureous smoke which always rise more or less from the grey soil are more dense and hiss like great serpents as they curl upwards to the sky. It is altogether an uncanny place. Here and there the black mud bubbles and boils, rising up in small cones which subside with a strange rumbling noise like the hoarse barking or growling of a distant watchdog. The ground sounds hollow under foot, and shakes if you walk near any of the blowholes, while the smell of rotten eggs, so characteristic of sulphur springs, is overpowering, particularly after rain.