FROM BOLOGNA the Via Emilia continues south-eastwards below the line of the Apennines. The sequence of towns continues: Imola, still dominated by a remarkable fortress; Faenza, famous for her maiolica and with a worthy museum that celebrates it; Forlì, whose museum boasts the masterpieces of that seducer of the Emilian Seicento, Guido Cagnacci; then Cesena, and finally, where the road reaches the coast, Rimini, memorable above all for the Franciscan church, the Tempio Malatestana, designed by Alberti for that most grasping of Renaissance despots, Sigismondo Malatesta.
Cesena is a comfortable town. It lies at the northern end of the main route through the Apennines from the upper valley of the Tiber, and has been occupied since prehistoric times. Contended for by the Church and others, it was granted by Pope Urban VI in 1379 to Galeotto Malatesta, whose family held it until 1460. Cesena subsequently reverted to the Church, and for obvious strategic reasons was chosen in 1500 by Cesare Borgia as the capital of his short-lived duchy of the Romagna. The town was the birthplace of successive popes, Giovanni Angelo Braschi, Pius VI (1775–99), and Barnaba Chiaramonti, Pius VII (1800–22), who survived the indignities to which he was submitted by Bonaparte to regain his sovereign status and be portrayed by Sir Thomas Lawrence for the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor. A patient man, he was the last pope to create a great palazzo for his family, vying with the mansions of the local plutocracy.
The cathedral and churches of Cesena are not of especial interest. Nor perhaps is the Rocca Malatestiana, begun for Galeotto, continued by his successors, and strengthened from 1466 by the papal governor. But the Biblioteca Malatestiana is one of the great libraries of Europe. The neoclassical front of the Palazzo delle Scuole gives no hint of what lies behind: a stair leading to the long corridor to the Biblioteca Comunale. Here a door surmounted by a pediment with the elephant of the Malatesta opens to the Biblioteca Malatestiana. Commissioned by Malatesta Novello, who ruled Cesena from 1429 to 1460, and inspired by the library Cosimo de’ Medici had commissioned for the Dominican Observants of San Marco in Florence, this was built in 1447–52 as the library of the Franciscan convent. The architect was Matteo Nuti, who also worked on the Rocca. The library is an aisled room eleven bays in length; the central barrel-vaulted section is higher than the cross-vaulted aisles and divided from these by arcades resting on fluted columns. One’s first impression is of beautifully controlled light, distributed through the pairs of smallish arched windows in each bay of the lateral walls and the octofoil window high on the end (east) wall. The reading desks in the aisles were thus served by natural sidelight. No fewer than 136 of the manuscripts ordered by Malatesta remain in the Biblioteca, which is thus the oldest humanist library of the kind to survive at least substantially intact, largely because after Malatesta’s death the Franciscans preserved it until their convent was suppressed. The exterior’s purpose is beautifully expressed in the rows of almost pointed windows set in stone frames high on the brick walls.
Cesena: Matteo Nuti, Biblioteca Malatestiana.
