The Maritime Museum of Cesenatico is the main Italian maritime museum dedicated to traditional and work boats , and one of the main in this field in Europe . Born with the floating part in the early Eighties, he was among the pioneers in the field of recovery and enhancement of vintage boats and maritime traditions. The Museum is closely linked to the ancient Leonardesco Canal Port , the backbone of the town around which the historic center branches off with the fishermen's houses and the places for the sale and conservation of fish.

The Floating Section , located in the oldest part of the canal port, hosts ten traditional Adriatic boats complete with the colorful "sails to the third" which are hoisted every day in summer. There is also a Sailing Section with three boats still in operation, protagonists of numerous outings at sea which, together with other traditional boats of the Romagna coast, animate a busy calendar of historical regattas . Over the years, the recovery of the maritime heritage of the place has favored the restoration of other small traditional hulls of private ownership to which the Municipality of Cesenatico has reserved a stretch of the canal port called Porto delle Vele .

During the Christmas holidays, the historic boats of the Floating Section host the suggestive Marineria Nativity scene with life-size statues which, alongside the characters of the religious tradition, reproduce characteristic figures of the fishing village: the fisherman, the fishmonger, the piadinaia, the laundress, the dolphins.

In 2005 the Ground Section was inaugurated with a modern layout and numerous video materials including rare vintage films and 3D animations and with new services and activities offered to the public and schools. The large exhibition pavilion, designed as an ancient arsenal, houses in the center a trabaccolo and a fishing bragozzo, two typical fully equipped traditional boats. At the beginning of the path, dedicated to "structure and construction", you can touch the simple materials and technologies with which man has navigated for millennia. Among the exhibited pieces, the rope maker's wheel, the large winch, a nineteenth-century workshop of naval carpentry acquired as a whole and rearranged in the museum. In the part dedicated to "propulsion and steering", on the other hand, ancient and modern anchors and didactic installations are exhibited where one can measure one's ability with maneuvers, knots and hoists. A large part is dedicated to the evolution of sailing equipment, and to the transition from sail to motor. Upstairs, the exhibition continues with exhibits that exemplify life on board, fishing, its marketing, navigation, magical-religious symbols, among which the "pulizon" and the suggestive "bow eyes" stand out, and again, the pitfalls and dangers of going to sea, to end with the start of the tourist enterprise.

Therefore a double but inseparable museum, whose components - the Floating Section and the Ground Section - complement each other in an attempt to reconstruct the identity of the place in detail and evoke emotions and suggestions of a cultural heritage, material and immaterial, otherwise lost.