Coriano

The name seems to come from the Latin Fundus Cornelianum. The rocca is first mentioned in 1197, and in 1356 the Church of Ravenna handed the fortress to the Malatesta; the village grew up at the foot of the castle. Under Roberto Malatesta it became the family's holiday residence, the curtain wall was rebuilt and the perimeter enlarged. The arches, the battlemented tower and the thick walls are still there, and so are the underground caves, almost all of them unexplored. The town's coat of arms is borrowed: after a Spanish attack in 1512 the castle was rebuilt by the Sassatelli, to whom Coriano had been granted in 1528 and who had their own blazon carved into the first gateway arch. The comune took it over and added a heart, canting arms for its own name, and it has never been formally recognised.

In 1859 Coriano became the seat of a district and of a court with jurisdiction over seven comuni around it. Then came the war: on the fourteenth of September 1944 the British Eighth Army, on its way to Rimini, fought here one of the harshest breakthrough battles of the Gothic Line, and the village was bombed until almost nothing was left standing. On the ridge stands the Commonwealth war cemetery, where Allied dead of every nationality lie, and a memorial stone recalls the forty civilian victims of the Saline, who died in September 1944 under the collapse of the shelters on the banks of the Rio Melo and under bombs aimed at nearby German positions. The rebuilt town is the town of Marco Simoncelli, world champion in the 250 class.