Third Age Wellness at a Luxury Longevity Retreat

How I lost two kilos, grew taller and got a takeaway of tips on how to age well.

Jane Egginton visits the unique Lucia Magnani long life clinic with diagnostics, mud treatments and five meals a day as its USP.

Mussolini enjoyed the health giving properties here a century before my stay, along with the pleasures of the decadent Grand Hotel next door which today has a Michelin starred restaurant. Guests of the clinic eat dinner at the hotel, but are giving a prescribed menu with carefully controlled portions that nevertheless include pasta, some kind of dessert and even a glass of health giving local red wine.

My daily programme is incredibly well thought out and detailed, with three days of solid activities including everything from a posture lesson and free radical lecture to memory testing. I am exfoliated, covered in mud and meet with all number of white-coated professionals who test my blood and even my internal organs.

I love the white tracksuit I am given on arrival, complete with gold logo and embrace the feeling of checking into some kind of high-class sanatorium. On the third day, though, I swap a gym session for a gelato and a spot of roof top sunbathing with a mountain view in the name of my own form of wellness.

‘You are not slim’, I am told in one of the startling meetings with medics, although apparently I present as 20 years younger than my actual age. A doctor walks me up and down the corridor correcting my posture with a silver stick. He tells me fasting is stupid and that it is vital to distribute protein and carbs throughout the day. I actually find this very useful, along with the huge amount information that is generously given.

It definitely feels time for an ‘emotional shower’ in the stand out spa. I didn’t discover the meaning of this, but basked in the flood of warm thermal waters and the heat of the low-it sauna before bathing in the Chartreuse coloured waters of the semi outdoor pool. It is here where I am given an aqua aerobic session alongside some other guests who seemed to be not only ageing well but happily.

My assigned ‘angel’ (every guest has one) tells me the water is coloured by chlorella. This has both aesthetic and therapeutic qualities, which could be said to describe all the treatments at the Lucia Magnani clinic.

‘If you think you may die of a heart attack and I tell you to hang from a tree daily, you will do it’, one of the doctors tells me, his words as stark as his white coat. ‘But most people don’t want to change their habits and will make excuses, like they don’t have time for breakfast or exercise.’

As a wellness writer and healer, I have written about and facilitated retreats worldwide, yet the knowledge I have received here is life changing. With the words of the doctor still with me: ‘The biggest issue for the third age is, frailty’, I continue to walk, eat and breathe differently.

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