The Malatesta Fortress

The first historical reference to the place where today stands the Malatesta Fortress - one of the medieval castles of Rimini - dates back to the Bavaro Code, which states that at the end of the ninth century, on the Mons Iovis rise, stood the castle called Santarcangelo. The second reference to the implantation of a fortified place - or castrum - refers to Federico Barbarossa who in 1164 granted Santarcangelo two diplomas to the Ravenna monasteries of Sant'Apollinare and San Severo. From the first half of the thirteenth century, between alternating events related to the struggle between Guelphs and Ghibellines, the dominion over Sant'Arcangelo and the responsibility of the building structure gradually passed to the Malatesta: the Dante "old Mastin" presidiò for a short time the castle on the occasion of his passage at the head of the Guelph party, and in 1288 his son Gianciotto subtracted him for a little over a year from the town of Rimini. This latter circumstance has led some scholars to set the tale of Dante by Paolo and Francesca between the walls of the Rocca. But it was in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with Galeotto (1323-1385), Carlo (1368-1429) and Sigismondo Pandolfo (1417-1468), that the Malatesta succeeded in acquiring the undisputed dominion over the vast area surrounding Rimini. And it was above all thanks to Sigismondo Pandolfo - scholar, warrior and architect - that the fortress of Santarcangelo assumed, at the end of the works in 1447, the definitive configuration that still today preserves.