Our story
A course written into the land
The Valmarecchia valley. The Marecchia river. A Brian M. Silva routing opened in 1995. And, on land the Malatesta walked centuries before the first tee was cut, a much older story still.
The valley
The Valmarecchia runs from the Apennine watershed down to the Adriatic at Rimini, carrying the Marecchia river — the Ariminus of the Romans — past a chain of fortified hilltop towns that watched over the old trade route between Rome and Ravenna. Verucchio. Torriana. San Leo. And, rising above them all on Monte Titano, the three towers of the Republic of San Marino, visible from our closing holes. The course was routed to let the valley do most of the talking.
The Malatesta lands
Verucchio — "Veruculum prima Malatestarum patria" — was the ancestral seat of the Malatesta family, the dynasty that would go on to rule Rimini, Cesena, Pesaro and Fano. Malatesta da Verucchio, Dante's "Mastin Vecchio", was born at the Rocca and died in 1312; his descendant Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta expanded the Rocca del Sasso in 1449. The fortress still stands directly above the valley floor where the course now plays.
Long before the Malatesta, the same ground was home to a Villanovan settlement — one of the richest in Italy. Verucchio's Museo Civico Archeologico holds the finds from more than six hundred tombs, dated to the 10th to 7th centuries BC: bronze work, textiles, and a wooden throne that is one of the oldest pieces of carved furniture to survive from antiquity. It is a startling amount of history to have on the doorstep of a golf course.
"Veruculum prima Malatestarum patria" — Verucchio, first home of the Malatesta.
The timeline
1995 to today
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1995
The course opens
The 18-hole championship course opens at Villa Verucchio, designed by American architect Brian M. Silva and routed across the floor of the Valmarecchia at around 80 metres above sea level. The brief was simple: let every fairway frame the valley's medieval skylines rather than compete with them. The 7-hole executive course opens alongside it.
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1996
Enrico Bianconi joins as resident professional
Enrico Bianconi, who began playing at Circolo Golf Perugia at the age of eleven and qualified as a FIG Maestro in 1999, becomes titular professional at the club. Three decades on, he still runs the academy and the junior programme he started.
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1999 – 2023
Three decades of teaching credentials
Bianconi builds his qualifications alongside the club's own growth: FIG Maestro (1999), PGA Italiana membership, TPI Level One certification (2013), FlightScope X3 certification (2021), and qualification as a Golf Club Director (2023).
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Today
Affiliated with Federazione Italiana Golf
The club competes and issues handicaps through the FIG, with results and entries managed on Gesgolf. The par-72, 6,145-metre championship layout carries current EGA ratings, and the club is affiliated with the wider network of Emilia-Romagna golf.
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2026
Rimini Verucchio Golf Club
The club continues to play the same Silva routing that opened in 1995, in the same valley the Malatesta once ruled and the Villanovans settled a thousand years earlier still. What changes year to year is the conditioning of the course and the welcome at the gate — not the land, and not the view.
Deeper history
Verucchio, before the Malatesta
Verucchio's hilltop position mattered to people long before the Malatesta arrived. Between the 10th and 7th centuries BC it was the seat of a major Villanovan settlement — the culture that preceded the Etruscans in this part of Italy. More than six hundred tombs have been excavated in the necropolises around the town, yielding some of the richest Villanovan grave goods found anywhere: amber, bronze, woven textiles, and the celebrated carved wooden throne now held at the Museo Civico Archeologico. It is a reminder that the view from our 17th and 18th holes has been worth looking at for a very long time.
What you can expect
The course you play today is the course Brian M. Silva drew in 1995 — gently undulating fairways on a valley floor, the Marecchia and its tributaries in play, and an honest, strategic test that rewards a committed swing and forgives a relaxed one.
Enrico Bianconi has been the club's professional since the year after it opened. Ask him about a hole and you will get thirty years of it back — which is, in the end, the whole point of a course that has never needed to reinvent itself.