Rimini

Rimini has a problem of reputation. Mention it to anyone in Italy and they immediately picture the Adriatic coast in July — kilometre after kilometre of beach clubs, umbrella rentals, fish restaurants, sunburnt northern Europeans sprawled in plastic loungers. This is accurate. This is also, I discovered, roughly ten percent of what Rimini actually is. The other ninety percent begins the moment you turn your back on the sea and walk inland for fifteen minutes into the historic centre, where a Roman city of considerable ambition is hiding in plain sight behind the resort’s loud reputation.

I arrived in October, deliberately — after the summer crowds, before the winter closure of half the seafront businesses. The beach was largely empty, the sand raked clean, and a handful of die-hard swimmers were still braving the Adriatic in wetsuits. I gave it twenty minutes of respectful attention and then went to find what I’d actually come for: the Arco di Augusto, erected in 27 BC and still standing at the southern entrance to the old city, its stone worn smooth by two thousand years of weather and touching. Then the Ponte di Tiberio — a bridge begun under Augustus and completed under Tiberius, still carrying traffic across the Marecchia river, its five Roman arches absolutely unimpressed by the centuries they’ve outlasted.

The Tempio Malatestiano is the strangest building in Emilia-Romagna. It began as a Gothic Franciscan church, then Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta — the Lord of Rimini, an impeccably ruthless Renaissance condottiere — commissioned Leon Battista Alberti to encase it in a marble Classical shell in the 1450s. What you get is a church that looks from the outside like a Roman triumphal arch and temple combined, but contains inside both Franciscan frescoes and Malatesta family tombs. Sigismondo is buried here alongside his court humanists and astrologers, which tells you something about his idea of proper company in the afterlife. Pius II was so offended by the whole thing that he held a mock burning of Sigismondo’s effigy outside Saint Peter’s in Rome. That is a level of infamy worth acknowledging.

Fellini, who was born here and clearly absorbed both the beach vaudeville and the buried strangeness of the town, has a museum now — the Fellini Museum, opened in 2021 in the Castel Sismondo. I spent an afternoon in it and came out wanting to watch everything again: the dreamlike quality of 8½ suddenly explained by the mixture of Roman ruins and tacky beach glamour that this city has always produced. The museum is designed with real intelligence, organized around themes rather than chronology, and the film installations in the lower levels are genuinely disorienting in the best way.

The piadina in Rimini is different from Ravenna’s — flatter, crispier, cooked on a hot stone, and the filling here tends toward squacquerone and rucola or prosciutto crudo rather than anything more elaborate. I ate three of them from different stalls in the old market square over two days and enjoyed them more than I expected to enjoy something so simple. That, too, is a Romagnolo lesson: restraint and quality producing more than elaboration.

When to go: September and October — the beaches are winding down, the crowds have gone, the historic centre becomes navigable, and the light on the Adriatic in autumn has a quality that summer never quite produces. Spring from April is also excellent. Avoid July and August unless the beach is specifically what you’re after.