During the second half of the XIX century Riccione was a small and very poor community and life was based on agriculture and fishing. Tourism and seaside holidays did not exist yet in the way that we know them today.  Within this poor and backwards atmosphere was the Ceccarini couple, Giovanni and Maria Boorman Wheeler. Sensitive to the demands and the necessities of the little community of Riccione, they developed and promoted numerous welfare and health activities. They began together but, when Giovanni – the doctor – died, the widow, American by birth, decided to carry on what her husband had started, supporting the first Mutual Aid Society for Workers, which dealt with food distribution to the needy families. In 1891 Maria inaugurated the first nursery that gathered Riccione’s children.  Fees were based the economic possibilities of the families and an avant-garde pedagogical plan was developed, based for the first time on principles for the development of children’s personality and not, as it was common at the time, on principles of simple assistance. The following year Maria Boorman laid the first stone of what is still today the Ceccarini hospital, inside which the destitute sick were cured at no cost. The relevance of this initiative is even more considerable if we consider that at the time the only hospital of the area was in Rimini , which only took patients from the city. Another important implementation that took place thanks to the kind lady was the port of Riccione , for which Mrs Ceccarini put up most of the necessary capital and later paid entirely for the building of the access road. To her death, Maria Ceccarini’s established that she wanted the hospital to become a moral institution and bequeathed her legacy in order to assure the structure had the necessary economic self-sufficiency to continue.