A working fishing port with a Leonardo da Vinci-designed canal running straight through its heart — the Adriatic at its most unpretentious.
Cesenatico is the kind of place I stumbled into almost by accident, driving up the coast from Rimini looking for lunch, and ended up staying for two days. It’s a small fishing town on the Adriatic, less polished than its bigger neighbors, and its centerpiece is a canal port that runs directly through the middle of town — not decorative, not touristic in origin, but a real working harbor still lined with fishing boats.
What makes the Porto Canale genuinely remarkable is that Leonardo da Vinci himself designed it. In 1502, working for Cesare Borgia as a military engineer, Leonardo surveyed the Romagna coast and drew up plans to fortify and improve the port at Cesenatico — his original sketches, held today in the Royal Library at Windsor, show the canal essentially as it still exists. Standing on the swing bridge at the harbor mouth, watching a fishing boat chug in past the old lighthouse with gulls wheeling overhead, I found it strange and wonderful that this working-class fishing town has a five-hundred-year-old engineering pedigree that most tourists sail right past.
The Floating Fleet Museum
Moored permanently along a stretch of the canal is the Museo della Marineria, an open-air maritime museum where restored traditional bragozzi and trabaccoli — flat-bottomed sailing boats once used across the northern Adriatic, each painted in loud, specific colors and patterns that functioned as a kind of family signature — float at their docks as if still in use. On the first and third Sunday of the month volunteers actually hoist the sails, and the canal fills with a wash of red, ochre, and blue canvas against the water. I happened to catch one of those Sundays entirely by luck and stood on the bridge for far longer than I meant to.
Fish Straight Off the Boat
This is not a place for elaborate dining — it’s a place for grilled fish so fresh it barely needed the fire. Along the canal, small trattorie serve the day’s catch: grilled sardines, fried calamaretti, brodetto (the local Adriatic fish stew, thick with tomato and a dozen varieties of small fish and shellfish depending on what came in that morning). I ate at a plastic table two meters from the water, watching the same boats that had supplied my dinner tie up for the night, and it was one of the simplest, best meals I had in Emilia-Romagna.
When to go: Late June through early September for beach weather, but try to time a visit to a first-or-third Sunday for the Museo della Marineria’s sail-hoisting — it’s worth building the trip around.