At Bagno Vignoni, an enchanting village in the Commune of San Quirico d'Orcia, there is a medieval pool of thermal water, around which stood houses, inns, and later the church of San Giovanni Battista. The numerous archaeological findings unearthed here show that the water was already utilised in Roman times. In later ages Bagno Vignoni was visited by famous personages, foremost among them Lorenzo the Magnificent and Enea Silvio Piccolomini (Pope Pius II). The water was analized and described by the naturalist Giorgio Santi, but its usefulness was not limited – as noted by Emanuele Repetti – to its therapeutic effects alone; it served, in fact, to put "in motion 5 or 6 mills built one above another inside the travertine caves."

Today, thanks to rearrangement of the area carried out by the Commune and the ensuing inauguration of the "Park of the Mills", visitors can admire some of the buildings mentioned by Repetti, which remained abandoned up to the middle of the 1950s. The activity of milling was, in fact, along with that of the baths, one of Bagno Vignoni's major resources.