I guess if you are into spa culture (hot water enemas, mineral baths and all the rest), Abano and the Hotel Venezia Terme are for you. Apart from hot water cures or the convention centre (which took me to Abano), it is hard to know why anyone would wish to visit this charmless, bleak town. The hotel is a square concrete block with the feeling of a sanatorium about it. Indeed, there is a ward of cubicles in the basement, each with an examination couch and tubes hanging from the wall. I really started to wonder how many places one put/insert mineral water. The room we had was "superior". It was certainly spacious (with a door wide enough to get a hospital trolley through it) but it had a standard of decoration somewhat lower than your average Accident and Emergency room in a 1970s Bulgarian polyclinic. There was not a scrap of information in the room about local events and services, not even a television guide. A single dreary picture adorned the pale green walls. The feeling was that one stayed here not for pleasure but for treatment. So depressingly clinical was the whole hotel experience that I gladly rushed to my conference every day at the earliest opportunity.
Abano seems to be a magnet for every geriatric German with rheumatism. (It is also a country club for every winged insect known to man!)Avoid Abano unless you are serious to the point of crankiness about mineral water and its unthinkable uses. This place is like Bournemouth without the sea. My tip is drive straight through and don’t look back. Pay a little extra and stay in Padova, about 10 km down the road. The average age is about 50 years younger than in Abano and Padova is simply beautiful.
- Terme Venezia Spa
