How to discover the Italian coastal city of Rimini away from the beaches 

Bakary Tamba surveys his neat kingdom of sand, and smiles. The folded cream parasols on his patch of the Adriatic coastline stretch almost to the water’s edge, all perfectly aligned. The fine, blonde expanse is manicured and already warm to the touch. Offshore, a small yacht is coaxing a few knots from the morning breeze. All is as it should be — save for the absence of people. But they’ll come. They always do.

The private beach club where 41-year-old Bakary works is one of scores that share Rimini’s 10-mile-long lungomare (seafront). The aesthetic may not be to everyone’s liking; from a distance, the columns of kaleidoscopic parasols look like a kitsch military rally. But for the price of a rented sunlounger, beach-goers get cleanliness, showers and changing rooms, drinks and dishes delivered to their laps, and the reassurance of lifeguards like Bakary.

“This,” he tells me, swinging his arm in a wide arc, “is the very best beach in Italy.” The Italians themselves certainly think so, descending en masse to this wind-freshened fringe of Emilia-Romagna as the sapping heat of July and August tightens its grip on the peninsula. But like many Riminesi, Bakary is eager to stress that this is more than simply a resort town. And the message, he says, is getting through. “These days, people come for the beach — then they discover Rimini.”

Monia Magalotti is both a beneficiary of, and driving force for, this inland migration. As a guide with Discover Rimini, the amiable 50-year-old hosts tailored walking tours delving deep into the city’s urban strata — and there’s much to unpack. A meeting point for traders as far back as the eighth century BCE, Rimini was founded by the Romans in 268 BCE and enriched with palazzi and frescoes during the Renaissance. The opening of its first public beach in the mid-19th century kick-started a lurch towards mass tourism that reached its nadir in the 1980s and 1990s, with cheap hotels and armies of clubbers.

Monia has exuberant curly hair and a personality to match, and when she talks of the damage wrought on Rimini’s reputation by these partying masses she grows animated. “We were very upset with what happened to our city,” she says, as we enter the centro storico, the largely pedestrianised historic core, lit by the slanting sunlight of early summer. “Go abroad, or even in Italy, and if you say ‘I’m from Rimini’, people say ‘ah discos!’. On the plus side, it means the city is almost always a surprise.”

Roman relics

Today’s travellers may underestimate Rimini, but the Romans never did. They chose the location for its strategic position in a bow of the Adriatic and at the mouth of the Marecchia river, which flows from the Appenines. It’s also at the confluence of the two key roads through which imperial dominance was asserted: the Via Flaminia, running south to Rome, and the Via Emilia, which cut a 140-mile swath north west across the fertile Po Valley.

The richness of the Roman legacy has created challenges for urban developers over the decades. “This is a city with what we call high ‘archaeological risk’. You can’t make any sort of hole in the ground without someone watching,” says Monia, as we join the arrow-straight Corso d’Augusto — ancient Rimini’s principal thoroughfare, now energised with cafes and boutiques.

The Domus del Chirurgo (Surgeon’s House) is one such example of chance findings. It was painstakingly excavated after being discovered during routine works on the municipal gardens in the nearby Piazza Ferrari in 1989. More than 150 surgical implements were unearthed, including bone saws and arrow-head extractors. I spend an enthralling, unsettling hour striding the elevated walkways that showcase this former home, while imagining the howls of former patients echoing from the compact, mosaic-adorned rooms.

The most visibly impressive relics of Rimini’s illustrious Roman era face off at either end of the Corso d’Augusto, like magnificent Istrian-stone bookends. The southern side is marked by the 55ft-high Arco d’Augusto, a triumphal arch built in 27 BCE. It so resonated with Mussolini that the dictator ordered the destruction of the houses and walls around it in the 1930s, better to show off its imperious proportions. At the northern end, there’s the five-arch Ponte di Tiberio, a now-pedestrianised bridge that’s reverberated to the sound of everything from marching Roman legions to Second World War Panzer tanks over the past two millennia. Together, they symbolise the Roman Empire’s military and engineering might — yet they’re still very much a part of daily life. I watch flip-flop-wearing cyclists pedal nonchalantly beneath the Arco d’Augusto.

I follow the lead of well-dressed young couples taking their early evening passeggiata (stroll) along the Corso and over the Ponte di Tiberio, and head for Borgo San Giuliano — the ‘Borgo’ to locals. If anywhere symbolises the quiet, largely unseen resurgence of Rimini in recent years, it’s this former fishing neighbourhood. Marooned half a mile inland by silting of the Adriatic, it was saved from dereliction and impending destruction in the 1980s. Today, it’s a maze of lovingly tended, pastel-shaded cottages. Many are adorned with murals evoking the city’s piscatorial past or celebrating scenes from the films of the city’s most famous son, post-war director Federico Fellini. Inevitably — and some might say, aptly — his hit 1960 film La Dolce Vita features often.

Sated by a dinner of seafood tagliolini and piadine (a local staple of flatbread filled with soft squacquerone cheese) from century-old trattoria La Marianna, I forfeit a digestivo in favour of an enchanting hour searching out the Borgo’s artwork and hidden gardens. Jasmine scents the mild evening air. Laughter and the clink of glasses from the street-side wine bars follow me down the slender, cobbled lanes. Rimini’s parasols and sun loungers suddenly feel a long way away.