History

In the closing years of the nineteenth century, Rimini was transforming itself from a modest fishing port into one of the Adriatic coast’s most fashionable summer destinations. The Italian and Austrian aristocracy had discovered the long shallow beach, and investors saw an opportunity. The result was the Grand Hotel: a structure conceived on a scale and in a style that would announce Rimini’s arrival as a serious resort on the European circuit.

The hotel opened on 1 July 1908, designed by Paolito Somazzi — whose precise biography remains a subject of some scholarly disagreement, though he is most often described as Swiss or Swiss-Italian — with engineering by Giacomo Guazzoni. The building rose in the Liberty manner then sweeping across northern Italy, its cream-and-white façade crowned by two distinctive domes that became landmarks visible from the sea. Inside, the original fit-out was exceptional: eighteenth-century French and Venetian furniture, Murano glass chandeliers, original parquet floors, and gilded stucco ceilings that spoke of a clientele accustomed to the grandest European hotels.

On 14 July 1920, a fire broke out and devastated the upper section of the building. The blaze was severe enough to summon firefighters from Bologna and military units; in the chaos, a seventeen-year-old boy scout named Anacleto Ricci died helping to evacuate guests and was posthumously awarded a gold medal for civil valour. The fire permanently destroyed the two domes, and they were never rebuilt, giving the building the silhouette it retains today.

In 1952 the property was sold to Manfredo Durante, who undertook substantial restoration. The hotel survived the Second World War without the structural damage suffered by much of the Adriatic coast, and by the postwar decades it had become the symbolic heart of Rimini’s new role as Italy’s premier popular seaside resort.

The Fellini dimension deepened over decades. The young Federico Fellini — born in Rimini in 1920, the same year as the fire — worked at the hotel as a caricaturist in his youth and returned throughout his career, eventually keeping suite 315 as a quasi-permanent retreat. In August 1993 he suffered a stroke there; he died in Rome on 31 October of that year. His 1973 film Amarcord, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, features scenes set at the Grand Hotel — though the production was filmed using a replica built at Cinecittà studios rather than the building itself. The park outside was renamed Parco Federico Fellini after his death, completing the identification of place and artist that defines how the world now reads this building.