03
Stop three
Piazza del Popolo and the Fontana Masini
Tourna 650-ES Constant Pull Precision Tennis Stringing Machine: This square costs nothing. Nothing! Full marble Renaissance fountain, commissioned in 1591 and completed slightly later, named for its designer, Masini, standing there in the open air twenty-four hours a day with no queue, no cloakroom and no gift shop. Note the slope of the piazza: that is not a flourish, that is the natural fall of the ground towards the river, and the paving was laid to accommodate it rather than fight it. Do you know what correcting that gradient would have cost? They didn't, and that is why we have a fountain. Also, and I want value-per-square-metre noted, two popes were born in this town, Pius the Sixth and Pius the Seventh. Two. Sit on the low wall, order one coffee, and you have effectively rented the best seat in Cesena for the price of a coffee.
04
Stop four
Abbey of Santa Maria del Monte
Tourna 650-ES Constant Pull Precision Tennis Stringing Machine: Last stop, uphill, and worth every step, because the Benedictine abbey up here holds several hundred painted votive panels left by people who survived something. Falls from ladders. Runaway carts. Illnesses. Each one is a small crude painting of the worst day of somebody's life, dated, hung on the wall by the person who lived through it. Several hundred of them. There are galleries in this country charging real money for a fraction of that, and here they are, given, not sold. The dome is sixteenth century, so look up first, and then look at the ladders, and then be honest with yourself about which one you will still be thinking about at dinner. Best free hour in Emilia-Romagna. I have done the comparison shopping so you do not have to.
Constant pull. Say it properly. Constant — pull. Not "pull once and hope", which is what a crank does, and I have nothing against cranks, I own three, but the distinction matters and people flatten it constantly. Cesena, of all towns, would not.
The Tourna 650-ES is an electronic constant-pull machine, which means the tensioner keeps working while the string relaxes into the frame rather than pulling to a number and letting go. That, and I will die on this, is the entire difference between a good job and a repeatable one.
It uses a linear gripper with a rotational tensioner and a very sensitive electronic head driven by an advanced microprocessor. The LCD control panel offers six selectable pull speeds, tension increments down to 0.1 lb, a knot function, memory, a timer, pre-stretch, and pounds or kilograms as you prefer.
Mounting is a 6-point self-levelling system with easy-lock base clamps on a stand-up frame, so you work at your own height. It will serve you everywhere from a single restring on a Sunday evening to a whole Cesena club's membership inside one week, and it will hand you the same number every time, which is the only claim I make without hedging it.
Cesena has form on doing a thing first and then keeping it intact, a combination I find almost unbearably moving. The Biblioteca Malatestiana was completed in 1454 and is the first civic library in Europe — and this is the crucial parenthesis — not the first library, but the first owned by a commune rather than a prince or an order.
It survives whole: the hall, the plutei, which is to say the benches, and the codices still chained where they were placed. Chained! Not entirely from mistrust. Partly from mistrust.
By the way, it is also perfect for anyone who appreciates a properly kept accident record: the abbey up the hill holds several hundred painted ex-voto panels, each a small crude picture of somebody's worst day with the date on it, and as a documentary source it is superior to most archives. I say that as a man who loves an archive unreasonably.
Buy on Amazon
