Rimini, August 2, 2026 – Simona Ventura, 61 years old, journalist and television host, originally from Bentivoglio (Bologna). Giovanni Terzi, 62 years old, journalist and Milanese writer. They got married on July 6, 2024 at the Grand Hotel di Rimini. Since 2019, the Malatesta city has been their favorite place for August holidays. Ventura and Terzi, from today, embark on this journey to Rimini for our newspaper, the city that united them. From the initiative ‘La Terrazza della Dolce vita’ to holidays spent with children and parents. Week after week, they will reveal all the beauties of Rimini until the end of summer.
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The story
I Rimini, as a child, I almost considered it an enemy. It seemed distant, mysterious, almost hostile. I was from Riccione, and in Riccione you always choose which side to be on: either this side or that side. I spent nine years of my childhood there, from ages 3 to 12, because my mother rented every summer a dépendance of what had been the villa of Claretta Petacci, next to the hotel Carlton, and I grew up with the local kids and with the son of the Carlton owners.
I was Riccione inside, not a passing tourist: I remember one summer I ate a frozen watermelon from one of those giant refrigerators and ended up straight in the hospital. Since then, watermelons, melons and their “cousins” cucumbers and melons I don’t even want to see painted. Then the 2000s arrived and, with them, work: the golden years of Romagna discos, the Paradiso, the Baia Imperiale, the Prince, the Pineta di Chicco Cangini in Milano Marittima. There, nightlife was lived live, and popularity at the time was built by really meeting people. Today instead, with digital, that desire has somewhat faded. The real turning point in my relationship with Rimini came in 2019, thanks to Giovanni.
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He had spent his whole life at the Grand Hotel, and when I returned there after a long time, I was enchanted: an ancient and warm atmosphere, but at the same time modern. From that moment we never left Romagna, and August for us became synonymous with that place. In 2020 Paola Batani asked us for a hand to restart the communication of the Grand Hotel after the Covid closure: this is how ‘La Terrazza della Dolce Vita’ was born, a few friends at first, then the discovery that people, coming out of months of solitude, really needed to see each other live.
Today we are at the seventh edition, which grows year after year. The Grand Hotel has become over the years the meeting place for our children, my mother and my father and those fifteen days in August are prepared for months, with my mother choosing clothes well in advance. The memories inside are many, and getting married right in Rimini seemed natural to us, not a scenic choice, because for us it means home, it means family. We were more than a thousand guests, and we divided the wedding in two: a party in Milan and, in Rimini, one hundred couples of friends at the Grand Hotel. Today, when I look at Rimini, I no longer see the hostile place I saw as a child: I see it almost as the Miami of Italy, between sports, dance, yoga and culture, and it is there that Giovanni and I think of retiring, maybe at seventy, to pass the baton to those who want to carry on what we have built. That the city once an enemy has become my home is one of the most beautiful things life could give me.
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