Gabicce Mare

Gabicce is the northernmost comune of the Marche and the smallest in extent of its province: it sits on a little bay at the very end of the Romagna coast, and many people in fact count it as part of Romagna. A papal bull of 998 calls it Castellum Ligabitii — from which came Ligabizio, then Le Gabicce, then Gabicce. In the fifteen hundreds two potters born here, Girolamo and Giacomo Lanfranco, worked out a way of decorating ceramics with pure gold, and that technique made them famous throughout Europe.

The old village is the one up on the promontory; what changed everything was a port, built after the First World War at the mouth of the Tavollo together with the neighbouring town of Cattolica, which is in another region. The port made the fishing grow and started the tourism. In a few decades the lower town had overtaken the upper one, and in 1942 the town hall moved down there and the comune took the name it has now, Gabicce Mare. Since 2008 a moving footbridge over that same river joins it to Cattolica: you walk from the Marche into Romagna. In September 2004 the bora here touched a hundred and fifty kilometres an hour.