Leave early in the morning.
Not because it’s far — San Leo is thirty-five kilometres from Rimini. But because San Leo needs to be met when it’s still cool, when the light is at a low angle and the stones of the village haven’t yet stored the heat of the day.
Take the SS258. It’s the road that climbs alongside the Marecchia river, the one locals know well because they drive it in summer to reach the cooler valleys inland, but few follow it all the way to the end. As the city falls away behind you, something shifts — gradually. The plain narrows. The hills rise. The noise disappears.
It’s in that moment — when the tarmac begins to climb and the valley tightens — that you realise you’re going somewhere else.
Not just geographically.
When the Plain Runs Out
The Marecchia Valley is one of the most beautiful valleys in the Romagna hinterland. Not because the brochures say so — because you see it with your own eyes as you drive. The Marecchia river runs to your left, deep green in summer, swollen and turbulent in winter. The hills alternate with small hilltop villages: Verucchio, Torriana, Poggio Berni. Names that anyone who’s lived near Rimini for years knows well but rarely visits.
Every bend opens a different view.
This isn’t the coast, with its straight lines and horizontal sea. Here everything is vertical. Forests run down to the edge of the road. Stone houses cling to the hillsides as if afraid to fall.
Past Novafeltria, the road changes again. It gets steeper. The bends multiply. And at a certain point — when you already think you’ve come far enough — you see it.
The Rocca di San Leo.
You can’t miss it. A mass of limestone rising vertically from a plateau, as if someone decided that right there, on that exact spot, something definitive had to be built. The fortress sits at the top. The village clings to its feet.
You stop for a moment at the roadside before heading up.
Not to take a photo — or at least, not only that. But because you need a moment to take in what you’re seeing.
A Village Frozen in the Fifteenth Century
San Leo is a genuine medieval village.
Not reconstructed, not restored for tourists, not tidied up for show. It’s simply there, as it always has been, with its stone streets, its three-storey houses pressed between narrow alleys, its main square that could be set in any century of the last thousand years.
The Pieve di San Leo — the ancient parish church — is Romanesque, built in local sandstone. Austere. Almost severe. The kind of church that doesn’t try to impress you, yet does anyway.
But what you’ve come to see is the Fortress.
You walk up — just a few minutes from the centre — and as you climb, the view over the valley keeps opening wider. The Marecchia far below looks like a silver thread. The villages you drove through are now distant dots.
And then you step inside.
The Fortress of San Leo is not a fairytale castle. No romantic towers, no picture-postcard drawbridges. It’s a military machine. Built to resist, not to impress. Federico da Montefeltro had reclaimed it in 1441, and a few decades later commissioned Francesco di Giorgio Martini — one of the most brilliant military architects of the Renaissance — to make it impregnable.
He succeeded.
The walls are thick. The bastions are calculated to deflect cannonballs. Every angle is designed to eliminate blind spots. It’s not a place you want to be if you’re on the outside trying to get in.
But it’s not a place you want to be if you’re inside, and you can’t get out.
The Man Who Fooled All of Europe
To understand what Cagliostro is doing in this story, you have to go back a few centuries.
It’s 1743. In Palermo, Giuseppe Balsamo is born, the son of a merchant. An ordinary young man, from an ordinary family, in a city that in that era offered few alternatives to those born without titles or land.
But Giuseppe Balsamo was not ordinary.
He was intelligent — that sharp intelligence that reads people, understands what they need, and gives them exactly that. Or at least makes them believe so.
He left the monasteries early. Drifted through Italian cities. In Rome he married Lorenza Feliciani. With her began the great adventure: London, Russia, Eastern Europe. And through all that gallop across the continent, he built a character that the eighteenth century didn’t know how to classify.
He called himself the Count of Cagliostro.
Alchemist. Freemason. Healer. Founder of the Egyptian Rite — his own variant of Freemasonry, invented from scratch, mixing hermetic symbols, Oriental rituals and a generous dose of theatrics. European courts received him. Nobles sought him out. Women believed him completely. Men were more sceptical, but many of them ended up drawn in too.
He was not a simple con man.
He was a storyteller. And the eighteenth century was hungry for stories.
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When Fortune Turns: the Diamond Necklace Affair
Every great character has a moment when everything comes crashing down. For Cagliostro, that moment was Paris, and it involved a diamond necklace.
The story is complicated — historians call it the Affair of the Necklace, the Affaire du Collier — but in its essential version: Cagliostro was drawn into an elaborate fraud involving Queen Marie Antoinette as an unwitting protagonist. Someone had convinced Cardinal de Rohan that the queen secretly wished to purchase an extraordinary diamond necklace worth millions of livres, using him as a discreet intermediary.
The necklace was delivered. The money never arrived. The Queen knew nothing about it.
When the scandal broke — and a scandal of that scale could not but break — it touched many. Including Cagliostro, though his precise role remains debated by historians to this day. He was arrested. He ended up in the Bastille.
A year later he was released — the judges had insufficient evidence against him. But the damage was done. He fled to London, then returned to Italy.
In Rome, in 1789, Pope Pius VI ordered his arrest. This time there was no escape. He was locked in Castel Sant’Angelo. His wife Lorenza — who had shared twenty years of adventure with him across half of Europe — abandoned him at that moment.
He was alone.
The death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. But the real ordeal was only just beginning.
The Cell That Measures Three Steps by Three
The Fortress of San Leo was the perfect prison for Cagliostro.
Far from Rome. Far from cities. Impregnable by design. Difficult to reach even for anyone who might attempt a rescue.
When his followers — and he still had them, scattered across Europe — began circulating rumours of a possible escape plan, the papal authorities decided to take no chances. Cagliostro was transferred to the Pozzetto.
It’s not a metaphor. It’s a real cell, still visible today, and it is exactly what the name suggests: a well. Three metres by three. Stone walls. No windows. The only access — the only contact with the outside world — was an opening in the ceiling.
Imagine what that means.
It’s not total darkness — light enters from above. But you don’t see the sky normally. You don’t see the horizon. You don’t see the Marecchia Valley hills outside. You see a square of light that moves across the day, then darkness.
Cagliostro — the man who had frequented the courts of half of Europe, who had spoken with kings and cardinals, who had crossed the continent like a comet — spent over four years in that cell.
He died on 26 August 1795.
He was 52. A stroke.
Standing in That Room, Even for Just a Minute
When you visit the Fortress today, you can see the Pozzetto.
You can’t go in — it’s not allowed. But you can lean over the edge. Look down. Try to imagine what it felt like to be in there.
You can’t, really.
Some human experiences are too remote from what we know to be truly understood. We can study the numbers — three metres by three, four years, an opening in the ceiling — but what those numbers mean in terms of lived time, solitude and sensory deprivation stays beyond reach.
What remains is a physical sensation.
You stand in that fortress, look down into that cell, and feel something that isn’t exactly fear and isn’t exactly sadness. It’s closer to silence. A heavy silence, as if the centuries of stone around you have absorbed everything and have no intention of giving it back.
Legend says Cagliostro’s ghost still walks the battlements.
I’ll make no comment on legends. But I’ll tell you that walking out of that fortress and turning back to look at the landscape — the green valley, the rounded hills, the silver thread of the Marecchia below — tastes different afterwards.
Who Was This Man, Really
Cagliostro’s story is a complicated one to judge.
On one hand: he was a fraud. He sold cures he couldn’t guarantee, membership in rites he’d invented, an aristocratic identity he didn’t have. He took people’s money. He used others’ credulity as raw material for his trade.
On the other: the eighteenth century was an era when official medicine was often more dangerous than no medicine at all. Diseases had no reliable answers. In this context, Cagliostro wasn’t the only one offering alternatives — he was simply the best at it, and the best at constructing around those alternatives a convincing theatre.
And then there’s a subtler question: what does people seek when they seek someone like him?
They seek answers. They seek relief. They seek the impression that someone understands, someone has access to something they don’t. It’s a question as old as humanity. The answer Cagliostro gave, however built on fragile foundations, was still an answer.
It doesn’t absolve him. But it makes him more human.
The Fortress as Mirror
The Fortress of San Leo witnessed many stories before Cagliostro.
Federico da Montefeltro — the lord who transformed it into the building you see today — was one of the most powerful and sophisticated men of fifteenth-century Italy. Warrior and humanist, patron of artists and professional condottiere. For him, the Fortress was a symbol of power, not just a military structure.
Then history moved on. The Fortress changed hands. Papal prison, museum, monument. Every era left something behind.
But Cagliostro is the character everyone remembers.
Perhaps because his story has something universal in it. The man who built a character larger than himself, who convinced Europe he was what he was not, who ended up alone — without the invented identity, without his wife, without his followers — in a nine-square-metre cell.
It’s not a simple story. But it tells us something about how fragile everything we build truly is, and how certain places — certain walls, certain stones — remain to tell the tale centuries later.
What to Take Home (and How to Plan the Visit)
Before heading back down to the valley, stop in San Leo’s main square — Piazza Dante. The Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta dates from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with a Romanesque apse in sandstone that changes colour with the light: warm yellow in the morning, almost rose-tinted at sunset.
If you’re visiting with children or teenagers, the Fortress holds attention without anyone needing to explain why. You can walk the battlements, peer into the wells, understand how a medieval defensive structure actually worked. It’s still authentic — not transformed into an amusement park.
If you want to stay for lunch, San Leo has a few trattorias in the historic centre. Romagna cooking, close to its roots.
Practical information:
- Getting there: from Rimini, take the SS258 Marecchiese towards Novafeltria, then follow signs for San Leo. About 35 km, 50-60 minutes’ drive.
- Fortress of San Leo: open all year with varying seasonal hours — check the official website of the Comune di San Leo before you go.
- Entry: paid admission (check current prices on the museum website).
- Best time to visit: spring and autumn to avoid summer crowds. In winter the fortress is even more atmospheric, but check opening times.
The Return
Head back down the SS258 towards Rimini in the late afternoon.
The light is different now. The hills have a warmer colour, almost orange. The Marecchia glitters below. Traffic is almost nonexistent.
You think about the morning. About that fortress appearing around a bend. About the Pozzetto. About Cagliostro — Giuseppe Balsamo, the son of a Palermo merchant — who never left that cell.
But you also think about the valley. About the quiet beauty of a stretch of Romagna hinterland that too many people drive past on their way to the sea.
The sea is beautiful. It’s our home, our calling card. But the real Romagna — the one that never fits on a postcard — is here. Among these hills. Among these villages. Along these roads that climb and take you somewhere else.
And this kind of ‘somewhere else’ always does you good.
When you get back to Rimini, if you’re looking for somewhere to land, you know where to find me. At the Aqua Hotel, in Marina Centro — five minutes from the sea and an hour from San Leo.
