Cervia

Cervia stands where it does because a pope had it moved. The old town lay in the middle of the salt pans, among the marshes and the malarial mosquitoes, and by the seventeenth century it had shrunk to a few hundred inhabitants; in 1697 Innocent XII signed the decree ordering it rebuilt further east, close to the harbour and to healthier air. The document laid down how many houses to build and where to put the cathedral, the bishop's palace and the prisons: what came out was a town on a rectangular grid, closed by walls, with only two gates, barred every evening. Inside stood the salt warehouse, which could hold thirteen thousand tonnes, and the tower of San Michele, raised against the corsairs who from the sixteenth century raided this coast and sold its men in Algiers.

Salt explains all the rest. That of Cervia is called sweet salt because it has almost none of the sulphates that leave a bitter aftertaste, and the finest of it, the salfiore, a bishop began sending to the pope as a gift: it became the pope's salt and reached the papal table until 1870. At the Camillone pan it is still gathered by hand, in the local manner. And since 1445, on the first Sunday of every May, the bishop throws a ring into the sea, as one of his predecessors did in a storm on the way back from Venice, and lifeguards and fishermen dive for it: the evening's festivity belongs to whoever finds it. To the north lies the town's second founded settlement, Milano Marittima, laid out in the early twentieth century on the garden-city model, and around it a pine wood of two hundred and sixty hectares between the sea and nine kilometres of beach.