Rimini

Rimini is Fellini's hometown and never stopped being his film. The maestro was born here in 1920, and Amarcord is the city's autobiography — the Grand Hotel's white bulk still moored like a liner of dreams beside the beach empire of umbrellas that made Rimini the capital of the Adriatic holiday; the Fellini Museum now spreads through the Renaissance castle and a cinema-palace, projecting the director's imagination back onto the streets that formed it.

The deeper city is patrician Roman and princely: the Arch of Augustus and the Bridge of Tiberius still carry the town's traffic after two thousand years, the surgeon's house mosaic quarter glitters underfoot, and the Tempio Malatestiano — Alberti's marble recasting of a Gothic church for the tyrant Sigismondo — holds Piero della Francesca's fresco and Renaissance theory made stone, one of the fifteenth century's decisive buildings.

Music regained its jewel with the reopened Teatro Amintore Galli: inaugurated in 1857 with the premiere of Verdi's Aroldo — the composer supervising in person — the theatre returned to service in 2018 after long postwar silence, its seasons and the associated Coro Lirico "Amintore Galli" reconnecting Rimini to the operatic circuit under the name of the Romagnol composer-scholar. Piadina on the beach, Malatesta in the marble, Verdi in the stalls, Fellini everywhere: Rimini screens continuously.