An ‘experimental spa’ in Italy offers a new style of wellbeing destination where psychosomatic techniques are used to gently dissolve physical and emotional tension. Sophie Benge talks to the creator Patrizia Bortolin
By Sophie Benge | Published in Spa Business 2015 issue 2
‘‘Many people are still not ready to accept that what’s in our mind totally affects our body and visa versa. It’s a big change for a spa to use this knowledge as a core philosophy,” says Patrizia Bortolin, the creator and director of the Vair spa at the Borgo Egnazia resort in Puglia, south Italy.
Her approach to treatments is rooted in psychosomatics. She believes our wellbeing is related to the subconscious interplay between our emotional and physical states, which is enhanced by working with the body and the mind in a variety of ways – often subtle and playful but always with a real connection between therapist and client.
The result is a holistic, reflective and personal spa experience that differs radically from the cookie-cutter concepts of so many hotel spas. Guests at Vair (meaning ‘true’ in Apulian) can, of course, have a body massage or manicure, but can also explore the sound of their voice with a musician or have a facial that’s more of a psychological journey than a pore-cleansing sensation.
It’s a daring move given that spa-goers rarely try new things. So how did Bortolin convince the owner to fully embrace such a different spa concept and how well does it perform from a business point of view?
Variation on a spa theme Borgo Egnazia, a Pompeii-style mapping of villas, piazzas and pools, is a privately-owned, sprawling resort that’s earned its stripes in high-end hospitality. It’s been applauded by Conde Nast Traveller and has hosted Justin Timberlake’s wedding in the five years since it opened among the olive groves between Bari and Brindisi.
The 1,800sq m (19,375sq ft) underground Vair spa ticks the luxury list of flickering candlelight, trickling water, natural textures and cocooning silence, beautifully. There’s even a suite of Roman bathing facilities with a tepidarium, caldarium, Kneipp bath, plunge pools and marble scrub room that can be booked exclusively for couples. It’s highly indulgent by any standards. Yet this self-named ‘experimental spa’ also hints at a new concept for hotels – an unusual offering which may not have come to life if it wasn’t for the trust and bravery of hotel owner, Aldo Melpignano, who gave his director free reign with her creativity.
When Bortolin first met Melpignano through personal contacts, she was expecting to develop ‘a standard spa’, as she had done in her previous spa director roles across Italy – most recently at Bagni di Pisa in Tuscany. But Melpignano wanted something that embraced ‘natural’ and ‘Puglia’, something that gave his guests a sense of place and offered them genuine sincerity.
So when Bortolin came on board a year prior to opening, she took his wishes to heart and tapped into the energy of the surrounding landscape: an earthy, ancient terrain of olive and lemon groves, hot sun and sea breezes. “Egnazia is like a dream. My ideas changed when I came here. I had to follow my inspiration,” says Bortolin, who exudes honesty and passion in everything she does in relation to Vair.
On a prosaic level, this led to the development of products formulated around olive oil and prickly pear, an antioxidant-rich oil from the prickly pear cactus that grows prolifically in Puglia, as well as lavender and lemon.
On a more profound level, Bortolin delved into Apulian culture and wove local folklore with healing therapies and psychosomatics, which are her personal areas of interest and study.
In the three-day Tarant ‘tarantula therapy’ programme, for example, women rediscover their feminine side and are empowered with music and movement, yoga, psycho-emotional sessions with intuitive healers and holistic treatments. The programme is based on the Apulian tarant ritual for releasing the ‘sting’ that, according to myth, is metaphorically injected into women by the men in their lives!
Psychosomatic approach While Vair has all the trappings of an opulent spa on an aesthetic level, the real luxury is the intense personal connection which can only be offered to guests when therapists have a deep understanding and love of their craft. They have an intuitive awareness which allows them to work with their clients as individuals based on their own particular life histories.
It’s for this reason that Bortolin has chosen colleagues who share her psychosomatic approach – both in terms of expert practitioners, who count for a significant proportion of her team, as well as massage and facial therapists.
Gianni Rotondo, a psychologist and folk musician, uses sound and rhythm in his 90-minute Nu Suun Vair, ‘real sound’ treatment, which can be experienced privately or in a group. In this activity-based music therapy, guests play instruments and make harmonies to encourage imagination and communication as well as to release physical and psychological tensions.
With a similar objective for release, Stefano Battaglia, an Italian shaman and integrative healer, combines talk therapy with gentle handling of the body to treat joint and muscle pain. He does this in a way that simultaneously stimulates the body’s reflexes and self-healing mechanisms which in turn aid relief of psycho-emotional as well as physical stress. His 50- or 80-minute treatment, called Avenmari ‘sunset’, is the spa’s signature treatment.
It’s a mark of Bortolin’s commitment that many of Vair’s treatments were a year in research and practice before launching to guests. She says, “I think our treatments are so beautiful and very unique already. We can stay like this or we can take everything to a different level.” She and her team spend time tweaking treatment protocols during January when the tourist onslaught on southern Italy relaxes a little.
This year she invited a monk from India to spend time in daily meditation and discussion in her belief that ongoing personal nurture of what she calls the ‘community’ can only upgrade the spa experience for guests too.
Matching wellbeing with revenue With programmes such as Tarant, plus a psychophysical detox package and one based in outdoor fitness, all ranging between three and seven days, Melpignano believes Vair is ahead of its time. “Everyone’s speaking this holistic language now but it’s not always being delivered in luxury hotel spas. My belief has always been to develop a spa that puts special attention on the soul of our guests, rather than just offering nice massages,” he says. The programmes can even be adapted to suit individual needs. In fact the entire Vair experience feels more like tailor-made than off-the-peg.
Having said this, both Bortolin and Melpignano admit that their concept doesn’t appeal to all guests. “Some people don’t engage on the level we offer, they come to the spa for a massage because that’s what they want or they don’t expect anything else, so we offer these too,” says Melpignano. They also confess that the spa needs to contribute more than its current 5 per cent of hotel revenue, even though Vair already turns over more than €1m (US$1.1m, £0.7m) a year.
Melpignano believes revenues will increase by positioning Vair as a wellbeing destination in its own right rather marketing Borgo Egnazia as ‘a resort with a spa’. This shift in perception will also help to forge an upswing in winter business for the hotel, he says.
“We offer wellness in the broadest sense: good food, outdoor activities, culture, sea and spa,” says Melpignano. Together with Bortolin, he wants to see Vair’s deep and daring spa become a unique destination in the current surge in wellness tourism.
Read more from this issue of Spa Business magazine
Interview: Kathy Van Ness
The COO at Golden Door tells Katie Barnes how she’s used her background in fashion to reinvent the destination spa
Wellness: In sickness & health
The Urban Zen Integrative Therapy programme by designer Donna Karan helps acutely-ill patients in health and social care settings. Julie Cramer reports
Design: Sense of arrival
Neena Dhillon talks to the spa designers and operators at the new Aman and Ritz-Carlton properties in Japan
Ask an expert: Neuromarketing
Could this field of market research hold the key to finding out what customers really want? Rhianon Howells investigates
• Massages start at €90 (US$101, £65) for 50 minutes
• Nu Suun Vair: private class for two people €220 (US$246, £160) per couple for 90 minutes; group classes €50 (US$56, £36) per person
• Avenmari: starts at €120 (US$134, £87) for 50 minutes
• Three-day Tarant programme (including full board) starts at €1,000
• Rooms at Borgo Egnazia start at €220 (US$246, £160) per night
Bespoke couple’s package at Vair spa
First-person experience: Sophie Benge
Sophie Benge
I’m visiting Vair spa on a couple’s package that includes a bespoke mix of therapies. Side-by-side treatment tables in a double suite this is not. In fact it’s just as much about being apart as being together, in line with the Vair philosophy that “moments of separation make time together more passionate”.
It started with a 90-minute ritual in the Roman bathing suite, a boudoir of flickering candles, plunge pools and saunas… in other words breathtakingly romantic (pictured above).
Yet my lover was whisked away for a salt scrub while I went through the saunas, pools and ice shower alone with my therapist. We switched around and then we snatched a few together-moments in the pool before our head-to-head (rather than side-by-side) very oily massage. I felt the full force of togetherness when our therapists linked our arms over our heads and massaged them as one, a frisson that returns as I write, weeks later.
This marked the end of a day which included other dynamic ways of exploring our relationship. We entered a room with a lone Bohemian figure (Giuseppe Ciciriello, a local psychologist and musician) sitting on a stool, covering his face with a hat. It was up to us how we reacted – the silence was meant to enhance the energy between the three of us.
What followed was 90 minutes of animistic ritual: of dance, music and song. We swung and twirled each other and prodded and parried in a fencing sequence. We played tambourines, then sung an Apulian folk song which made my blood run cold (because I can’t sing) rather than the other way around! Yet I even asked to sing some more. The psycho-emotional release that the spa espouses clearly worked for me.
The whole experience was about learning when to create space between us and when to come together, exploring how we feel in a relationship through movement rather than words. Who knows what all this really means. The idea is not to analyse too deeply.
Despite an argument on the flight home, we both agreed our experience at Vair really did bring us closer together.
Sophie Benge is a journalist and author with a passion for wellness travel writing
Le Atelier by C.O.D.E. doesn't offer a standard bespoke service, it provides a highly
customised approach to designing massage beds and loungers in high-end wellness
environments. [more...]
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An ‘experimental spa’ in Italy offers a new style of wellbeing destination where psychosomatic techniques are used to gently dissolve physical and emotional tension. Sophie Benge talks to the creator Patrizia Bortolin
By Sophie Benge | Published in Spa Business 2015 issue 2
‘‘Many people are still not ready to accept that what’s in our mind totally affects our body and visa versa. It’s a big change for a spa to use this knowledge as a core philosophy,” says Patrizia Bortolin, the creator and director of the Vair spa at the Borgo Egnazia resort in Puglia, south Italy.
Her approach to treatments is rooted in psychosomatics. She believes our wellbeing is related to the subconscious interplay between our emotional and physical states, which is enhanced by working with the body and the mind in a variety of ways – often subtle and playful but always with a real connection between therapist and client.
The result is a holistic, reflective and personal spa experience that differs radically from the cookie-cutter concepts of so many hotel spas. Guests at Vair (meaning ‘true’ in Apulian) can, of course, have a body massage or manicure, but can also explore the sound of their voice with a musician or have a facial that’s more of a psychological journey than a pore-cleansing sensation.
It’s a daring move given that spa-goers rarely try new things. So how did Bortolin convince the owner to fully embrace such a different spa concept and how well does it perform from a business point of view?
Variation on a spa theme Borgo Egnazia, a Pompeii-style mapping of villas, piazzas and pools, is a privately-owned, sprawling resort that’s earned its stripes in high-end hospitality. It’s been applauded by Conde Nast Traveller and has hosted Justin Timberlake’s wedding in the five years since it opened among the olive groves between Bari and Brindisi.
The 1,800sq m (19,375sq ft) underground Vair spa ticks the luxury list of flickering candlelight, trickling water, natural textures and cocooning silence, beautifully. There’s even a suite of Roman bathing facilities with a tepidarium, caldarium, Kneipp bath, plunge pools and marble scrub room that can be booked exclusively for couples. It’s highly indulgent by any standards. Yet this self-named ‘experimental spa’ also hints at a new concept for hotels – an unusual offering which may not have come to life if it wasn’t for the trust and bravery of hotel owner, Aldo Melpignano, who gave his director free reign with her creativity.
When Bortolin first met Melpignano through personal contacts, she was expecting to develop ‘a standard spa’, as she had done in her previous spa director roles across Italy – most recently at Bagni di Pisa in Tuscany. But Melpignano wanted something that embraced ‘natural’ and ‘Puglia’, something that gave his guests a sense of place and offered them genuine sincerity.
So when Bortolin came on board a year prior to opening, she took his wishes to heart and tapped into the energy of the surrounding landscape: an earthy, ancient terrain of olive and lemon groves, hot sun and sea breezes. “Egnazia is like a dream. My ideas changed when I came here. I had to follow my inspiration,” says Bortolin, who exudes honesty and passion in everything she does in relation to Vair.
On a prosaic level, this led to the development of products formulated around olive oil and prickly pear, an antioxidant-rich oil from the prickly pear cactus that grows prolifically in Puglia, as well as lavender and lemon.
On a more profound level, Bortolin delved into Apulian culture and wove local folklore with healing therapies and psychosomatics, which are her personal areas of interest and study.
In the three-day Tarant ‘tarantula therapy’ programme, for example, women rediscover their feminine side and are empowered with music and movement, yoga, psycho-emotional sessions with intuitive healers and holistic treatments. The programme is based on the Apulian tarant ritual for releasing the ‘sting’ that, according to myth, is metaphorically injected into women by the men in their lives!
Psychosomatic approach While Vair has all the trappings of an opulent spa on an aesthetic level, the real luxury is the intense personal connection which can only be offered to guests when therapists have a deep understanding and love of their craft. They have an intuitive awareness which allows them to work with their clients as individuals based on their own particular life histories.
It’s for this reason that Bortolin has chosen colleagues who share her psychosomatic approach – both in terms of expert practitioners, who count for a significant proportion of her team, as well as massage and facial therapists.
Gianni Rotondo, a psychologist and folk musician, uses sound and rhythm in his 90-minute Nu Suun Vair, ‘real sound’ treatment, which can be experienced privately or in a group. In this activity-based music therapy, guests play instruments and make harmonies to encourage imagination and communication as well as to release physical and psychological tensions.
With a similar objective for release, Stefano Battaglia, an Italian shaman and integrative healer, combines talk therapy with gentle handling of the body to treat joint and muscle pain. He does this in a way that simultaneously stimulates the body’s reflexes and self-healing mechanisms which in turn aid relief of psycho-emotional as well as physical stress. His 50- or 80-minute treatment, called Avenmari ‘sunset’, is the spa’s signature treatment.
It’s a mark of Bortolin’s commitment that many of Vair’s treatments were a year in research and practice before launching to guests. She says, “I think our treatments are so beautiful and very unique already. We can stay like this or we can take everything to a different level.” She and her team spend time tweaking treatment protocols during January when the tourist onslaught on southern Italy relaxes a little.
This year she invited a monk from India to spend time in daily meditation and discussion in her belief that ongoing personal nurture of what she calls the ‘community’ can only upgrade the spa experience for guests too.
Matching wellbeing with revenue With programmes such as Tarant, plus a psychophysical detox package and one based in outdoor fitness, all ranging between three and seven days, Melpignano believes Vair is ahead of its time. “Everyone’s speaking this holistic language now but it’s not always being delivered in luxury hotel spas. My belief has always been to develop a spa that puts special attention on the soul of our guests, rather than just offering nice massages,” he says. The programmes can even be adapted to suit individual needs. In fact the entire Vair experience feels more like tailor-made than off-the-peg.
Having said this, both Bortolin and Melpignano admit that their concept doesn’t appeal to all guests. “Some people don’t engage on the level we offer, they come to the spa for a massage because that’s what they want or they don’t expect anything else, so we offer these too,” says Melpignano. They also confess that the spa needs to contribute more than its current 5 per cent of hotel revenue, even though Vair already turns over more than €1m (US$1.1m, £0.7m) a year.
Melpignano believes revenues will increase by positioning Vair as a wellbeing destination in its own right rather marketing Borgo Egnazia as ‘a resort with a spa’. This shift in perception will also help to forge an upswing in winter business for the hotel, he says.
“We offer wellness in the broadest sense: good food, outdoor activities, culture, sea and spa,” says Melpignano. Together with Bortolin, he wants to see Vair’s deep and daring spa become a unique destination in the current surge in wellness tourism.
Read more from this issue of Spa Business magazine
Interview: Kathy Van Ness
The COO at Golden Door tells Katie Barnes how she’s used her background in fashion to reinvent the destination spa
Wellness: In sickness & health
The Urban Zen Integrative Therapy programme by designer Donna Karan helps acutely-ill patients in health and social care settings. Julie Cramer reports
Design: Sense of arrival
Neena Dhillon talks to the spa designers and operators at the new Aman and Ritz-Carlton properties in Japan
Ask an expert: Neuromarketing
Could this field of market research hold the key to finding out what customers really want? Rhianon Howells investigates
• Massages start at €90 (US$101, £65) for 50 minutes
• Nu Suun Vair: private class for two people €220 (US$246, £160) per couple for 90 minutes; group classes €50 (US$56, £36) per person
• Avenmari: starts at €120 (US$134, £87) for 50 minutes
• Three-day Tarant programme (including full board) starts at €1,000
• Rooms at Borgo Egnazia start at €220 (US$246, £160) per night
Bespoke couple’s package at Vair spa
First-person experience: Sophie Benge
Sophie Benge
I’m visiting Vair spa on a couple’s package that includes a bespoke mix of therapies. Side-by-side treatment tables in a double suite this is not. In fact it’s just as much about being apart as being together, in line with the Vair philosophy that “moments of separation make time together more passionate”.
It started with a 90-minute ritual in the Roman bathing suite, a boudoir of flickering candles, plunge pools and saunas… in other words breathtakingly romantic (pictured above).
Yet my lover was whisked away for a salt scrub while I went through the saunas, pools and ice shower alone with my therapist. We switched around and then we snatched a few together-moments in the pool before our head-to-head (rather than side-by-side) very oily massage. I felt the full force of togetherness when our therapists linked our arms over our heads and massaged them as one, a frisson that returns as I write, weeks later.
This marked the end of a day which included other dynamic ways of exploring our relationship. We entered a room with a lone Bohemian figure (Giuseppe Ciciriello, a local psychologist and musician) sitting on a stool, covering his face with a hat. It was up to us how we reacted – the silence was meant to enhance the energy between the three of us.
What followed was 90 minutes of animistic ritual: of dance, music and song. We swung and twirled each other and prodded and parried in a fencing sequence. We played tambourines, then sung an Apulian folk song which made my blood run cold (because I can’t sing) rather than the other way around! Yet I even asked to sing some more. The psycho-emotional release that the spa espouses clearly worked for me.
The whole experience was about learning when to create space between us and when to come together, exploring how we feel in a relationship through movement rather than words. Who knows what all this really means. The idea is not to analyse too deeply.
Despite an argument on the flight home, we both agreed our experience at Vair really did bring us closer together.
Sophie Benge is a journalist and author with a passion for wellness travel writing
A recent survey by the UK Spa Association (UKSA) into the industry’s approach to cancer care
has revealed that almost half of participating respondents (46 per cent) are unaware that
cancer is a disability and guests with a cancer diagnosis must be given
Mexican operator, Solmar Hotels and Resorts, is hosting a series of events in celebration of
Global Wellness Day, including a Temazcal ceremony at its Playa Grande Resort and Spa in Los
Cabos.
Mandarin Oriental has announced a standalone residence brand, Mansions, which will debut at
Emirates Palace, Mandarin Oriental Mansions, Abu Dhabi, in 2029.
Four Seasons Resort The Nam Hai in Hoi An, Vietnam, has put together a Global Wellness Day
(GWD) agenda with activations rooted in nature and shaped by four pillars of Joy – in
alignment with the day’s theme #JoyMagenta.
The Global Wellness Summit (GWS) will celebrate its 20th anniversary at the 2026 event in
Phuket, Thailand, later this year with the theme: The Science, Art and Soul of Wellness.
Auko, an all-inclusive development, is opening in Phong Nha in Vietnam in Q3 2026, with a
series of 30 tented eco-lodges and wellness hospitality operations by Lumina Wellbeing.
Therme Manchester’s 28-acre development, which will include interconnected glass pavilions
that measure 65,000sq m, will be the largest bathing and wellbeing attraction in the world once
complete, according to prof David Russell, CEO of Therme UK.
Naples Beach Club, a Four Seasons Resort, has opened a 2,800sq m spa called The Sanctuary,
with the design and concept inspired by the Native American people that populated Florida’s
Southwest coast – the Calusa.
Le Atelier by C.O.D.E. doesn't offer a standard bespoke service, it provides a highly
customised approach to designing massage beds and loungers in high-end wellness
environments. [more...]
+ More featured suppliers
COMPANY PROFILES
Elemental Herbology Founded in 2008 by a Traditional Chinese Medicine Practitioner, Elemental Herbology is a spa, retail [more...]
