Riccione

The Green Pearl is a very young comune: until 1922 Riccione was a hamlet of Rimini. And the name, which today sounds like a holiday, most probably comes from the Greek arkeion, the burdock, the spiny plant that grows on the dunes of the Adriatic; in Romagnolo it is Arciôn. Before tourism the Flaminia ran through here, and there was a Roman settlement called Vicus Popilius: its archaeological site can be visited under the municipal pharmacy. But the fact that explains everything is another: in 1884 someone proposed using part of the shore for rice paddies. The side that wanted beach huts won.

The first lots for holiday villas are of the eighteen-eighties, conceived as a garden city, and the Bologna-Ancona railway brought the gentry. The most famous avenue of the Riviera, though, bears the name of a couple: the doctor Giovanni Ceccarini and his wife Maria Boorman, American, who once widowed paid for the town hospital and at the end of the nineteenth century had the first small harbour built at the mouth of the Rio Melo. The statue raised to her stands in viale Ceccarini. In 1934 Benito Mussolini bought a large house in the southern part of town, joining two properties and having a public road closed, and spent ten summers there: he arrived by seaplane, and a warship lay permanently offshore. The villa, left abandoned for years after the war, belongs to the town today and hosts exhibitions. Then came the aperitif on the avenue, the clubs up in the hills and the parks — Aquafan and Oltremare, among the largest in Europe — and behind the fashionable front there remains the family hospitality that is the Riviera's real technology.