Cesena

In 1454 the Malatesta opened the library of the convent of San Francesco to the citizens: the Malatestiana is the first civic library in Europe, and it is the only humanist monastic library to have come down completely intact — the building, the benches, the chained codices, the light — so much so that UNESCO entered it in the Memory of the World register. It is the treasure of a city people usually drive through and should instead open up, like its codices.

Cesena was founded by the Umbri around the fifth century before Christ, and flourished as a Roman town on the Via Aemilia: in the plain around it the Roman centuriation is still almost entirely legible, a grid of fields and roads two thousand years old that you can only see from above or on a map. Above the city, the Malatesta fortress dominates the Garampo hill; around it, the hard-working Romagna of fruit farming and wellness. The piadina here is folded differently from Rimini: do not mix them up.