Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was born here in 1463 — the prodigy who at twenty-three challenged the learned men of Europe and wrote humanism's manifesto, the "Oration on the Dignity of Man": the city of the Pico family carries his name across the world. Their rule lasted four centuries, and the centre keeps the layout of a miniature capital, wounded by the 2012 earthquake and patiently being stitched back together.
The other excellence is thoroughly modern: around Mirandola grew one of Europe's largest biomedical districts, born in the 1960s from a pharmacist's intuition. Renaissance memory and life-saving medical plastics: a pairing that tells Emilia's story better than any slogan.
Near Mirandola
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
