A-listers swear by the detoxing benefits of this Italian wellness retreat – could it help me start 2024 right?
After a boozy, stressful Christmas season, Madeleine Spencer was in need of some serious mind, body and soul rejuvenation. But how would she fare in the sensory deprivation tank and with all that very un-British nakedness at Palace Merano’s luxurious A-list retreat?
For someone who considers themselves an authority on wellness retreats and who has, over the years, embedded many of their practices into daily life, my December looked a bit like a month from the diary of Keith Richards. Drinks in Soho until I was tipped into a taxi well past midnight? Check. A debauched birthday party where the gin and tonics segued into champagne and then schnapps seamlessly? I did that too. Many, many beige foods where vegetables ought to have been? Guilty as charged.
And so it was a quite pale and puffy form I bundled onto the SkyAlps flight (incidentally, the inaugural one, flying from Stansted to Bolzano, Italy) eager to try the swanky and newly refurbished medical spa at Palace Merano in the South Tyrol region of northern Italy. It’s become known as a favourite of A-listers, including Victoria Beckham who has raved about it on her Instagram page, while footballers such as Zinedine Zidane and Cristiano Ronaldo were one-time regulars.
For me, the fusion of Chinese and Western medicine with proper testing to determine a course of action was what really appealed, and so I handed my body over to their doctors, masseuses, and energy experts in the hope of returning to London renewed.
I start proceedings in a flotation tank – and my head is bothering me. Not my mind (although that, admittedly, is the reason I have been sent into this world of silent darkness) but my actual head. It feels heavy, as if it might dip below the water should I truly release it. I ponder if the doctor also wants me to let go in this regard and not just figuratively, but then the nurse told me not to get the saltwater in my eyes.
I start to consider what other people do with their heads, then question whether mine is perhaps heavier than the norm, then decide I should probably stay alert and vigilant for the next hour – and so I begin wrestling with my mind more intensively than usual.
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Doctor Silvano Mascadri didn’t arrive at the conclusion that my head was really in need of a break by accident, or even by listening to my stream of thoughts when he asked how I was. Palace Merano is pretty hot on diagnostics and during my very first day, I have a check-up, a full blood test, urine tests, energy tests, and postural analysis among others – all of which inform my schedule for the ensuing days.
The results resoundingly find that I have been handed a rather standard-issue body (thanks, Mum and Dad) which, despite having endured a few big nights out, is functioning overall quite well. But my mind – that is clearly troubled. This, I’m told, is showing up in the form of excess cortisol racing through me, with energy testing revealing tension in my head, shoulders, and intestine (where stress has a little party in the gut, apparently).
My doctor tells me that they will focus on this, as well as giving my body an overall rest and reset, adding that “the mind and the body are not as separate as people think, really they are the same thing – but you do need a little help to be still inside yourself”.
And so here I am, banished to the sensory deprivation tank, floating in water that is 33 per cent salt. Zero outside info. No lights. No sound. Niente. Just me and my mind, which, stripped of stimulation, offers up some rather surprising things. First, it is all practical, and I decide to check my breasts while I’ve got time to do a really thorough job. Next, I think about mermaids and feel duped by the depiction of Triton’s palace in The Little Mermaid because surely it’d be all dark close to the bottom of the ocean rather than technicolour?
My doctor tells me that ‘the mind and the body are not as separate as people think, really they are the same thing – but you do need a little help to be still inside yourself’
While noticing my hair haloing me, the pre-Raphaelite muse and artist Elizabeth Siddall modelling for Millais’s Ophelia springs to mind, bath water cooling around her as time ticked on, illness setting in.
Inexplicably, badminton consumes more than a few minutes as I decide that I need to take it up again. By the time I’m thinking about Midsomer Murders and how this tank would be an excellent setting for the discovery of a body, I decide the doctor is right: these racing thoughts surely can’t be serving me very well.
A woman helps me out of the bath (she is, by the way, around the eighth staff member to have seen me fully nude during my various treatments, and I am by this point inured to the staff seeing my unclothed form), and I pad through the magnificently appointed corridors – we are talking more than five chandeliers in virtually every view – convinced I have to find a way to quieten my mind unless it’s directly engaged in a task.
The doctor has suggested dancing when back in London, so I start in the palatial room, shaking in front of the mirror to “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It”, amused by the combination of my flailing form and the majesty of those many chandeliers and the backdrop of the Dolomites peeping through my balcony door.
A quick word on Merano: there are lots of ways to enjoy it. You could come with others who aren’t fully engaged in the programme and experience all the medical facilities while they ski a mere 15 minutes away and join you for an evening meal or tea at the dry bar. You could go for a long walk as I did, surrounded by 40,000 subtropical plants thanks to the microclimate. Or you could simply spend your time at Palace Merano against a backdrop of the resplendent views encasing it, book in hand, as a drip makes its way into your bloodstream.
While the emphasis for me is on mindfulness and relaxation, the treatments and diagnostics are incredibly comprehensive, including everything from hydro-aromatherapy to hormonal assessments to plantar reflexology. I tried a smorgasbord of them, and would very much recommend osteopathy, which was thorough and targeted, as well as the massages, which they happily “prescribe” every day.
I found the blend of Chinese and Western modalities effective and holistic and the communication between the different departments very good (this isn’t the case in every medical spa I’ve visited). It’s worth mentioning that the staff are exceptional: friendly, efficient, and creating a homely atmosphere (which makes sense as I am told by the manager that most members of staff have been there for 10+ years).
That said, there is some work needed on the nutrition side of things. While the food is undeniably delicious, I felt there was too little education about eating habits as a whole. I was given sugar-heavy tropical fruits for breakfast after advising I had PCOS (meaning my body’s relationship with sugar is complicated and eating fruit for breakfast, for example, makes me feel wobbly, poorly, and exhausted after the initial high). These things will, I’m sure, in time be ironed out but ironed out they must be to compete with Merano’s peers on the gut-health level.
Overall, I’d unequivocally recommend Palace Merano if you’d like a thorough medical assessment followed by a genteel detox in sumptuous surroundings. For my part, I left after four days of treatments and rest with a remarkably still mind, conferring a calm that was helpful during the festivities. And, yes, I will be dancing now I’m back in London – and have booked a ballet class for January. Doctor’s orders.
Travel essentials
Getting there
SkyAlps flights between London and Bolzano start from €184 (£158) each way.
Staying there
The four-day Detox for Longevity Programme at Palace Merano is available from €2,860 per person, plus €212 which covers compulsory medical examinations with the doctor. Accommodation for five nights in single occupancy starts from €1,800 in a Comfort Room.
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