You walk past it every day.
Maybe you stop for a coffee in the morning, or meet someone under the clock tower. You look at it and think: the town square. Normal. Familiar.
You have no idea what’s happening under your feet.
You have no idea how many times this square has had to start over. How many names it has carried. How many stories it has buried under the asphalt — literally — and how many it has written in blood.
Four names. Two thousand years.
Let’s start from the beginning.
Under Your Feet Lies Rome
The Roman colony of Ariminum — today’s Rimini — was founded in 268 BC. The Romans decided this corner of the Adriatic coast was worth protecting. Worth building.
And how does Rome build? With order. With geometry. With two roads crossing at the exact centre of every city: the Cardine Massimo and the Decumano Massimo. You’ll find them in every Roman colony across Europe. Ariminum’s Decumano became what you now call Corso d’Augusto — the road connecting the Arco d’Augusto (Augustus’ Arch) to the Ponte di Tiberio (Tiberius’ Bridge), the city’s main axis, always.
The point where those two roads crossed became the forum.
Not a square in the modern sense. The forum was the beating heart of Roman civic life: the market, the courthouse, the place where political decisions were made, where you met people every morning and said goodbye every evening. Where daily life happened. Every season. For three centuries BC and beyond.
Trade flowed in from two directions. The Via Flaminia, built in 220 BC, entered Ariminum through the Arco d’Augusto. The Via Aemilia, built in 187 BC, started from the Ponte di Tiberio. Every merchant, every legionary, every imperial official travelling these roads ended up here — at this crossroads, in this forum.
Picture the noise. Carts unloading goods. Vendors shouting prices. Magistrates walking toward the basilica. Soldiers resting before heading north. Ariminum wasn’t a backwater — it was a strategic hub of Roman Italy. And its forum was the centre of everything.
And under Piazza Tre Martiri — under the asphalt you walk on when you go to buy bread — those Roman basoli (paving stones) are still there.
This is not a metaphor.
They are stone slabs dated to 1 AD, the Augustan era, when Emperor Augustus refounded Ariminum as a colony and adorned it with the monuments we still see today — the Arch, the Bridge, the new public buildings. The city was practically rebuilt from scratch. And the forum was repaved. Large rectangular slabs, tight-fitting, laid with the engineering precision the Romans never stopped showing off.
The same paving a Roman legionary walked on two thousand years ago.
If you want to see those slabs with your own eyes, go to the Museo della Città (City Museum). In the archaeological area on the ground floor you’ll find the original basoli and the inscription dating them. They’re not buried deep — they’re just centimetres below street level, right beneath where you walk every time you cross the square. The first and second floors are temporarily closed for works, but the Roman section is open.
Next to the basoli stood the Roman basilica. Not a church — in Roman times, “basilica” meant the courthouse, where magistrates handed down sentences and merchants settled disputes. Part of its structure survives today, partially underground, on the side facing via IV Novembre.
The square was called, simply, the Forum.
It didn’t need a name. Everyone knew where to go.
Piazza delle Erbe, Piazza Grande: Life Never Stops
The Middle Ages bring chaos. And new names.
Over time, the Forum becomes Piazza Grande. Then Piazza delle Erbe — the Herb Square. In that name you can feel the medieval energy of Rimini: horse races, dances, loud markets, public spectacles under the open sky. The square stops being a political abstraction and becomes the place where people live — where they buy, sell, celebrate and argue.
The porticos running along the square’s perimeter go back to that tradition. Even today, if you walk slowly along the edges, you can follow the thread of those medieval arcades. Shelter from summer storms, shade in August, a refuge in winter. Rimini has always understood that a square only works if you can be there even when the weather turns.
The construction of the Tempietto di Sant’Antonio (Little Temple of Saint Anthony) from the 1500s brings another name change: Piazza Sant’Antonio. The central-plan structure in Istrian stone that you can still see on the via IV Novembre side is white, geometric, almost silent amid the movement of the square. A small Renaissance gem that most passers-by don’t even notice.
But the name that lasted longest — before the final one — arrives in the 1500s, when a new block is built towards the sea and the clock tower is erected. The square takes the name Piazza Giulio Cesare.
Not by coincidence.
The Night Caesar Stopped the World
Picture the scene.
It’s January. 49 BC. A man in armour enters what is still the city’s forum. He has just done something illegal — he has crossed the Rubicon with his army, violated Roman law, declared war on the Republic. He doesn’t know it yet, but he is about to change the course of Western history.
Julius Caesar stops here.
Rimini — Ariminum — is the first Italian city he reaches after crossing the border. This is where he addresses his soldiers. He looks at them one by one. He must convince them that what they’re about to do is not blind revolt, but historical necessity. He must turn a disciplined army into a force willing to march on Rome against the law.
He does it. He convinces them.
And from this square begins the march that leads to civil war, the end of the Republic, the Roman Empire. Everything that follows — Augustus, the Caesars, the Romanisation of Europe — has one of its roots in this moment. In this forum. In this city.
For centuries, a cippo — a stone marker with Latin inscriptions, made around 1150 — commemorated this event in the square. Next to it, according to tradition, a large stone on which Caesar supposedly rested his foot while addressing his troops. Perhaps legendary, but powerful. The square kept that stone. It showed it to visitors like a civic relic.
The Second World War takes it away.
Caesar’s stone — lost. The cippo — reduced to a silent witness, stripped of the context that made it alive.
But the name remains: Piazza Giulio Cesare.
Until 16 August 1944.
It All Starts with a Threshing Machine
The story of the Three Martyrs doesn’t begin in the square.
It begins in a field, a few days earlier. August 1944 in Rimini is an August of occupation, curfews, impossible choices. A group of young partisans from the “Gastone Sozzi” Brigade decides to burn the threshing machine of a farmer who collaborates with the Germans — to stop his wheat from reaching enemy troops.
A small gesture, in the logic of the Resistance.
A huge one in its consequences.
On 12 August, the police are tipped off. Leone Celli, a partisan fighter, is captured. Under torture, he confesses. He reveals where the brigade members are hiding: in the former Caserma Ducale, near the Ponte di Tiberio — minutes from this very square.
Three of them are arrested.
Mario Capelli. Twenty-three years old.
Luigi Nicolò. Twenty-two years old.
Adelio Pagliarani. Nineteen years old.
Three young men from Rimini. Three people who had chosen which side they were on, at a time when that choice could cost you your life. They weren’t abstract heroes. They weren’t names on a monument. They were born here, grew up here, knew the same streets, the same squares, the same faces.
They are summarily tried by the court martial of the 303rd Regiment of the 162nd Infantry Division, presided over by Oberstleutnant Christiani and countersigned by General Ralph von Heygendorff. The sentence is death.
On the morning of 16 August, they are hanged in Piazza Giulio Cesare.
The execution is carried out by Turkmen soldiers — prisoners captured on the Russian front, turned into Wehrmacht auxiliaries. A deliberately cynical choice: this way, direct responsibility could be attributed neither to the Germans nor to the Fascists. A political murder carried out with someone else’s hands.
The square remembered.
On 9 October 1944 — less than two months later — the square changes its name for the last time.
It is no longer called Piazza Giulio Cesare.
It is called Piazza Tre Martiri. Three Martyrs Square.
Mario, Luigi, Adelio
They are not three abstract figures of the Resistance.
They are three young people from Rimini who at twenty decided it was worth risking everything. That a burned threshing machine was a political act, not a whim. That the wheat should not go to those who occupied their city.
Think about this: the city of Rimini had a towering name in its square — Julius Caesar, the general who had changed the history of Rome right here. A name every Italian knows. A name that had filled the square with historical significance for two thousand years.
They removed it.
They replaced it with three names that almost nobody outside Rimini knew at the time.
That is what I find extraordinary — not just the tragedy of the execution, but the choice itself. Rimini said: these three young men matter more than Julius Caesar. Their memory is worth more than two thousand years of imperial rhetoric.
Every time you walk through that square, you are walking where they were hanged.
You are walking where a city chose its own name.
The Tower That Counts the Days of the Moon
Before you leave — or maybe right now while you’re in the square — look up at the clock tower.
Most people notice it and move on. It’s a meeting point, a landmark, something everyone photographs. But if you actually stop and look, you discover it’s not a tower with a clock.
It has three clocks.
The first is a solar clock: wrought-iron hands emerge from a chiselled sun, elegant, almost archaic. The second is an astronomical clock: it shows lunar phases, months, decades of the year. A longer hand traces the moon’s disc across the sky — which phase it’s in, where we are in the month. The third is a band of terracotta decorations running around the tower: zodiac signs, constellations.
A machine for measuring time. Not just hours — also the days of the moon, the months of the year, the seasons of the sky. Built in an era when time wasn’t just practical, it was cosmological. Knowing the moon’s phase meant knowing when to sow, when to set sail, when to expect bad weather.
The tower was built in the 1500s, when an entire block was constructed towards the sea, narrowing the square on its eastern side. That area used to house the beccherie — the medieval butchers’ shops — and then the tower was raised. In the 18th century, architect Giovan Francesco Buonamici added the sinuous crowning profile you see today: a baroque flourish, almost an exception of lightness in a square that carries the weight of so many centuries.
Five centuries. Three clocks. A tower most people photograph and almost nobody actually reads.
How to Visit Piazza Tre Martiri and the Area
The square sits in the heart of Rimini’s historic centre, along Corso d’Augusto. From the Arco d’Augusto it’s a five-minute walk — following exactly the axis of the Roman Decumano Massimo, the same road used by legionaries and merchants for centuries.
Museo della Città — Via Luigi Tonini (steps from the square)
The archaeological area on the ground floor holds the original forum basoli and the inscription dating them to 1 AD. The upper floors are temporarily closed for fire safety works, but the Roman section is fully open.
- Tuesday–Sunday and public holidays: 10:00–13:00 / 16:00–19:00
- Monday: closed (except public holidays)
- Summer (late June–August): Wednesday and Friday also 21:00–23:00
- Full ticket: €7 | Reduced: €5 | Under 18: free
- Tel. +39 0541 704428
One hour in the museum, then step back out into the square. You’ll look at it differently.
What No Guidebook Tells You
Every time I take guests from the Aqua Hotel on a walk through the historic centre, I stop in this square.
Not for the clock tower — though it’s worth it. Not for the Tempietto di Sant’Antonio — that too.
I stop for the names.
There are squares that carry their names out of convention, convenience, or just to fill a space on a map. This one is called Piazza Tre Martiri because a city at war, in October 1944, took the greatest name it had — Julius Caesar, the general who had changed the history of Rome right here — and replaced it with three names of young people from Rimini that almost nobody outside the city knew.
Mario. Luigi. Adelio.
Not as an act of political rhetoric. As an act of personal memory. As if to say: these were ours. This square is theirs.
The Rimini I love isn’t the postcard version. It’s not the August beach, it’s not the nightclubs, it’s not the summer brand everyone knows. It’s this: a city that walks on two thousand years of history, that carries its dead with it, that doesn’t change its name for fashion but out of necessity.
Come and see it for yourself.
You know where to find me. At the Aqua Hotel.
