Tonino Guerra — the poet who wrote for Fellini, Antonioni and Tarkovsky — was from here, and Santarcangelo di Romagna resembles him: a melancholy, vital hill town riddled with more than one hundred and fifty tufa caves of still-debated origin, cellars or sanctuaries dug who knows when. Since 1971 its theatre festival, Italy's longest-running, has filled the squares with contemporary performance every July.
The town of 20,839 on the Via Emilia also produced Pope Clement XIV, the Ganganelli of the arch in the main square. Between a piadina and a rust-printing workshop — Romagna's canvases are still block-printed here on nineteenth-century mangles — this is the truest Romagna, one step from Rimini.
The Santarcangelo di Romagna guide
Near Santarcangelo di Romagna
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
