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Rimini occupies a peculiar double life on the Adriatic coast of Emilia-Romagna. For much of the twentieth century it was synonymous with mass beach tourism, the long arc of sandy shoreline drawing millions of Italians and Europeans to its rows of sun loungers and beach clubs each summer. Yet the city predates that reputation by roughly two thousand years, and the Roman infrastructure that survives here is among the best-preserved anywhere in Italy. The Arch of Augustus, erected in 27 BC and still standing at the southern entrance to the old town, is the oldest Roman triumphal arch in existence. The Tiberius Bridge, completed in AD 21, still carries pedestrians across the Marecchia river. These are not reconstructions or fragments; they are the original stones, and that continuity gives Rimini a layered quality that its beach-resort image tends to obscure.

The old town sits inland from the shore, compact enough to cover on foot in an afternoon. The Tempio Malatestiano, a fifteenth-century church that Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta commissioned as a monument to himself and his court, is one of the earliest Renaissance buildings in northern Italy, its exterior designed by Leon Battista Alberti. Piazza Cavour, the civic heart of the centre, is framed by the Palazzo dell'Arengo and the Palazzo del Podestà, both medieval, and a fish market that has occupied the same loggia since the sixteenth century. The relationship between this historic core and the beach strip a kilometre or so to the east is one of the more interesting urban contrasts on the Italian coast.