Bullicame di Viterbo: Where Dante Found the Boiling Water of Hell

In the fourteenth canto of the Inferno, Dante describes a stream born from a bubbling source — the Bullicame — whose waters were used by the prostitutes of Viterbo. The source still exists, exactly where the poet described it, less than two kilometers from the city center. It is a circular spring about twenty meters in diameter from which water emerges at 58 degrees Celsius, bubbling on the surface and depositing layers of white limestone that over the centuries have built an almost lunar formation around the mouth of the spring.

The Site and How to Visit

The Bullicame is located along the Via Cassia, just outside Viterbo heading toward Rome. There is a small parking area and a path leading to the main spring. Access is free and open. The main source is too hot for bathing — the water literally boils — but the channel that drains northward cools progressively, and at certain points, especially where small lateral pools form, the temperature drops to bathable levels around 38-40 degrees. The white limestone deposits surrounding the spring give the landscape a spectral and wondrous appearance.

History and the Dante Reference

Dante probably visited Viterbo during his years of exile, and the Bullicame evidently struck his imagination enough to place it in his infernal cosmology. The source was known to the Romans as Fons Viterbiensis and was used for therapeutic baths and for heating nearby dwellings through its drainage channels. Some of the ancient channels are still visible today, carved into limestone and tufa rock. A visit to the Bullicame can be combined with a tour of Viterbo's medieval quarter, just a few minutes by car.

Life Around the Spring Today

Near the Bullicame stand several paid thermal facilities that tap the same spring's waters. But the free source has its own following, made up of Viterbese locals who come to soak their feet in the warm water, geothermal enthusiasts, and literary tourists who come to photograph the Dantean site. The area around it is sparsely developed, with fields and olive groves, and retains that luminous marginality of places kept alive not by tourism but by everyday use.