Longiano

Longiano is twelve kilometres from Cesena, but all through the Middle Ages it looked the other way, towards Rimini, and it paid for it. In 1198 the men of Cesena assaulted the castle and destroyed it; the following year the men of Rimini rebuilt it. A few years later Cesena besieged it again, and this time the besiegers were driven back and beaten: with that victory, in 1216, the Malatesta became lords of the place. In 1297 the Cesenati came once more, allied with Forlì and Faenza, and burned the borgo. The Malatesta stayed here more than a century and a half, and in the castle, in 1429, Carlo Malatesta died. The arms, which go back at least to the sixteenth century, show exactly what the town defended: the tower of the borgo, and beside it the patron saint Christopher.

Today there is something else inside those buildings. The Malatesta castle, restored, houses a foundation of modern and contemporary art; the Teatro Petrella was built in 1876, in the decade of public works that followed annexation to the Kingdom of Sardinia, and restored a century later. And on the via Emilia, in the hamlet of Ponte Ospedaletto, there is something that exists nowhere else: the Italian Museum of Cast Iron, which collects street lamps and lighting fittings of different periods and makes — a museum of street lamps, with a smaller second site in the old centre. Through here, on the first of August 1849, passed Giuseppe Garibaldi as well, fleeing towards Cesenatico, helped by local guides.