On the Romagna Riviera between fun and sweet nostalgic atmospheres: a weekend in Rimini - I.

A city that is synonymous with holiday, fun and carefreeness, a tourist destination par excellence since 1843, the year the first Rimini bathing establishment was founded, but whose charm is not limited to the dolce vita of summers on the riviera. Besides the liveliness of its sandy beach that stretches for 15 kilometres along the Adriatic coast, and besides the sparkling nightlife that characterises it, Federico Fellini's city also has many other faces to show, almost as if they were the faces of film characters, involving the visitor in an exciting whirlwind of amarcord.

You only need to take a few steps admiring the many boats of a thousand colours, some of them moored to bollards sometimes dating back to the Roman era and among whose masts glimpses steeped in history can be seen, to realise that here memories have a fair wind: they are capable of taking us back in time in an instant, to the Roman Empire and beyond. The territory of Rimini must also have pleased travellers who arrived here long before us: the first human settlements in fact date back to the Lower Palaeolithic, a good 800 thousand years ago, and objects belonging to civilisations such as the Villanovans, the Huns and the Etruscans have been found in the area.

What attracted those populations would certainly not have been the nightclubs, but the same things the Romans appreciated, who founded their colony here in 268 BC: the strategic position of the territory that could serve as a link between North and South, the presence of rivers, of fertile land, as well as of the sea. The first monument from the Roman era we encounter is the evocative Tiberius Bridge, a symbol of the city together with the Arch of Augustus, with which it also shares its building material, Istrian stone. The bridge with five arches of increasing size toward the centre is also thought to have something mysterious about it: the presence of two grooves resembling the imprint of goat's feet on a balustrade has led some to consider the structure a devil's bridge, also as a work of engineering very advanced for its time.

Confirming the bridge's supernatural fame would also be the fact that despite the fierce bombing of the Second World War, which inflicted unprecedented destruction on Rimini, the Tiberius Bridge remained the only bridge the Germans failed to destroy. The Arch of Augustus, the oldest Roman arch, consecrated to the emperor by the Roman Senate in 27 BC, also survived the storms of history. It is an arch that was never provided with a door that could be closed: it is an arch that welcomes — almost as if at the time they had foreseen the great influx of tourists of the future, for indeed the policy of the emperor Augustus, aimed at peace, the Pax Augusta, made it pointless to close oneself behind a door.

Even if there were no nightclubs, entertainment was by no means lacking even then: witness to this is the elliptical-shaped Amphitheatre that was used for gladiatorial shows and later also came in useful as a defence against the barbarians. The walk through history continues in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the latter a particularly flourishing period for Rimini thanks to the lordship of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta. We thus admire the late-medieval Palazzo dell'Arengo, with its evocative loggia erected in 1204 and adorned with frescoes of the Rimini school of the fourteenth century. A little further on is the Palazzo del Podesta, erected in 1334 and characterised by three frontal Gothic arches. A reminder of Sigismondo Malatesta himself is the 1451 fresco in the Tempio Malatestiano by Piero della Francesca, which portrays the lord of Rimini in prayer before Saint Sigismund.

The exterior of the Malatesta funeral monument is instead the work of Leon Battista Alberti.