“Night is more beautiful and you live better…” sings the singer Lorenzo Jovanotti and this idea is very suitable for riccione’s night life. One, one hundred, one thousand Nights with capital ‘N’ in the Romagna ‘fortress’ consecrated to the cult of fun. In disco, of course! Post-atomic, frenetic, unholy show-nights with set designs that wave between kitsch and cyber, and chameleon-actors that every year appeal to thousands of faithful, delighted ‘pilgrims’. But also unfaithful exorcists and “scholars of the phenomenon” such as sociologists and those who go to discos dressed up like detectives in order to find out who are we, where do we come from and where do we go, and to bring out later some apocalyptical anathemas about youth and the planet’s future! As we say in Italy, talk dirty or taut, the important thing is to talk about things! Riccione-Rimini is a huge city on the hill where, depending on the time, you can suddenly find thousands of people in the main ‘monuments’: Byblos, Cocoricò, Ecu, Paradiso , Pascià, Villa delle Rose, Prince. Climate: WHITE-HOT!
In the surroundings, there is a dépendance close to sea with a very crowded beach during summer. It is a very nice place where you can have breakfast at 7 am before going to sleep. In the afternoon in viale Ceccarini – the main avenue of Riccione, you can drink the first cappuccino of the day and go shopping. There are a few tourists who happen to be there but many habitués. You cannot miss it. Best time: from 1 to 6 am.
In Riccione-Rimini discos, fiction and disguise are a must or, we’d better say, the law! The discos’ furniture, which change every year, suggest the fashion: discos are theatres to which the Night-people want to adapt to, changing their look to be trendy on the set. Is this folly? The ’68 is far away and people of our times are people who pretend to be, that at the end is not such an effort, you have just to choose the right space amongst the thousands of choices you are offered! Wildness is at home on Riccione’s hill! You can reach the “worlds of transgression” by car or by catching the Blue Line, a bus line dedicated to the Night-people. You need to be patient, the queue is like the one in Rome at the rush-hour, but everything happens in the area of few Kilometres. First you reach the Peter Pan, huge historical disco that dominates above the hill (at the moment it is being restyled). Going a bit further, you can find the Pascià and the Prince, very close to one another and with a lot of things in common, like techno music and extremely high volume: the first is dominated by huge post-modern style spaces that recall the Orient while the second is a mixture between a cage and a circus. However, night-lovers don’t pay attention to architecture as they are totally hypnotized by the ‘cubiste’ (girls who dance on huge cubes), multi-racial Barbie girls who dance in a very alluring way. A true Big Bang for the erotic fantasy of the average young Italian man: a jubilation of bra, panties, flowers in the hair and high heels (but how can they dance with such shoes?) and little nylon gowns that remind you of the charming Mid-west housewife. Possibly because these girls, in the disco context, are more desired than Claudia Shiffer, they earn €500 every night.  The youngest go to the ECU (that means European Club Underground but also the ‘fun unit of measure’). It is not a luxury place but an old farm as ‘nasty and bitter’ as the dj who plays a very ‘angry’ music. There is also an old farmyard which has become the “Giardino Metallico dei Desideri” (The Wishes Metallic Garden) made with nippy aluminuim and crystal trees. What about the wishes? Their unit of measure could be the last successful party of August 15, ended with the catatonic performance of the “Mutoid Waste Company”, armed with real flame throwers. However, the extraordinary parties are prerogative of the Byblos, a trendy disco made out of a wonderful Mediterranean villa with white arcades, belonged to Kashoggi. Byblos got into history thanks to insane-fun-mega nights, as for example the Bybloscar-Night, that every year delivers prizes to the discos best reps, DJs and nightspots of the Riviera; or the awesome Festa di Ferragosto (August 15 Party), in which fall, from an helicopter, one hundred million (counterfeit) dollars in 1.5 dollar green note mixed with a few thousands worth of real notes, to make the night more exciting and funnier. However the night-lovers are also kind: there are parties to collect funds for AIDS patients or Bosnian children....! Keeping dancing you arrive at the Cocoricó. Roberto D’Agostino, talking about this disco, said :< The Cocoricó is a disco like an electric chair is a chair>. Cocoricó is devil and muse, the non plus ultra of the fashion anticipation: here, every summer, the guest of honor is Jean-Paul Gaultier because, as the malicious assert, he’s got in hand the walk on his clothing collections even before designing them. People go to the disco dressed up in a way that you cannot even imagine and, surprisingly, they don’t do it in order to be different but actually to conform to the others! Homologation of transgression! Louder than the Rio Carnival, more frightening than one of Dario Argento films, this disco has the power to not be always the same. It has got three discos, one inside the other: the first is dug under a huge glass pyramid, in Louvre-style, where the techno-trance-hardcore music hammers under stroboscopic lights (after resisting five minutes, either you get bogged down or you sign a petition pro-heavy drugs); the second – the Titila privè -  where people let loose on the underground notes and dance very tight with majestic transvestites; the third one – the Cure for Pain-  where, after a really tough selection, you can enter and relax with ambient music. Night-people need built in suggestions. At dawn, once out of the disco, a useful address to eat or just for the last chat is the Tattoo in Riccione, the haunt of the untiring and inexhaustible night lovers. It is in Viale Tasso 2, by the canal-port, north side - Tel. 0541/648358
A night on Riccione-Rimini’s hills costs about €100 for a couple of entries, parking, petrol and a meal.