Myricae by Giovanni Pascoli (1891) — Pascoli was born in San Mauro Pascoli, a few kilometres inland from Bellaria, and this first collection of poems is rooted in the Romagna countryside: farmsteads, hedgerows, birds, and a persistent undertow of grief from his father's unsolved murder when the poet was twelve. The title means "tamarisks," the low scrub that grows along this coast. Reading even a few poems before visiting San Mauro Pascoli changes the experience considerably — the flat landscape suddenly becomes specific, charged with what he saw in it. Good bilingual editions with Italian text and English translation are available.
I Vitelloni and the world of Federico Fellini — Fellini was born in Rimini in 1920, and while no single book captures his childhood on the Adriatic, his films and the memoirs and biographies around them reveal a coast that no longer quite exists: the provincial boredom, the Sunday rituals, the men who never quite left home. Tullio Kezich's Federico Fellini: His Life and Work (translated by Minna Proctor) is the standard biography and paints a vivid picture of Romagna in the first half of the twentieth century. Rimini is twenty minutes away; reading this before or after a visit there gives the seafront a layer it otherwise lacks.
Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age by Robert D. Kaplan (2022) — Kaplan's meditation on the Adriatic Sea is not specifically about Emilia-Romagna, but it frames the entire coastline — Italian, Croatian, Albanian — as a place where civilizations have been pressing against each other for two thousand years. For a beach holiday destination that can seem purely recreational, the book is a useful reminder that this narrow sea has been a corridor of trade, invasion, and cultural exchange since antiquity. It reads well in sections.