San Clemente

The coat of arms of San Clemente is one of those that read like a page. The upper half is blue and stands for the sky; the lower is red, and it is the sea reddened by the blood of the martyrdom of pope Clement, who according to tradition was thrown into the sea tied to an anchor — and the anchor is indeed on the shield, together with the palm of martyrdom. The gold crown threaded on the cross, for its part, recalls the rule of the Malatesta. It is a curious detail: the village stands in the hills nineteen kilometres from Rimini, the sea does not touch it, and yet half its coat of arms is salt water, because that water is not its own but that of the saint it is named after.

The first written record goes back to 962, when the emperor Otto I made a gift of the Castrum Sancti Clementis to the counts of Carpegna. Then the castle entered the possessions of the Malatesta and stayed there, apart from a brief interval, until 1504, when it passed to the Venetians; from 1508 until the unification of Italy it belonged to the Papal State. That castle is still there and is the village itself: the centre of San Clemente lies largely inside its walls. Of the Malatesta age too is Castelleale, at once a fortified villa and a farm, while the parish church is nineteenth-century and keeps a Holy Family by the Rimini painter Giovan Battista Costa. Today the comune belongs to the association of the Cities of Wine, and the wine is Sangiovese; until 1992, when the province of Rimini was created, San Clemente was in the province of Forlì.