In the first five hundred of the “thousand years without a bath,” people invested considerable effort, ingenuity, and resources in securing water supplies for their various bathing complexes. Though this “frivolous” use of water cannot compare to vital functions like irrigation or quenching thirst, still water for bathing was important to early medieval Italians. Naturally enough, it was important in different ways at different times during the early Middle Ages, for the history of water supply is never static, being molded instead by shifts in the outlooks and requirements of users. This chapter delineates some of these differences in a panoramic sketch of the history of bathing, which highlights the gradual move away from large, easily accessible baths, the increasing reliance on private sources of water for an always more private, intimate bath, and the surprising endurance of very Roman notions on the purpose and function of baths in urban societies. As will emerge, the most relevant innovation in bathing customs in postclassical Italy was the gradual separation of the cleansing bath from the recreational bath (both types of bath existed in antiquity, but they went together). Such an innovation had repercussions on how people bathed. As customs of communal bathing lost their allure (this is another theme in the history of early medieval bathing), the patronage of public baths by rulers did too: by the ninth century subsidized baths were rather rare, for rulers did not include provision of public baths among their duties.