title: Rimini

text: As the terminus of the Via Flaminia, which ended in the town at the surviving prestigious Arch of Augustus (erected 27 BC), Rimini was a road junction connecting central and northern Italy by the Via Aemilia that led to Piacenza and the Via Popilia that extended northwards; it also opened up trade by sea and river.


title: Rimini

text: Remains of the amphitheatre that could seat 12,000 people, and a five-arched bridge of Istrian stone completed by Tiberius (21 AD), are still visible. Later Galla Placidia built the church of Santo Stefano.


title: Rimini

text: The evidence that Rimini is of Roman origins is illustrated by the city being divided by two main streets, the Cardo and the Decumanus.


title: Rimini

text: The end of Roman rule was marked by destruction caused by invasions and wars, but also by the establishment of the palaces of the Imperial officers and the first churches, the symbol of the spread of Christianity that held the important Council of Ariminum in the city in 359.


title: Rimini

text: When the Ostrogoths conquered Rimini in 493, Odoacer, besieged in Ravenna, had to capitulate. During the Gothic War (535–554), Rimini was taken and retaken many times. In its vicinity the Byzantine general Narses overthrew (553) the Alamanni. Under the Byzantine rule, it belonged to the Duchy of the Pentapolis, part of the Exarchate of Ravenna.


title: Rimini

text: In 728, it was taken with many other cities by Liutprand, King of the Lombards but returned to the Byzantines about 735. Pepin the Short gave it to the Holy See, but during the wars of the popes and the Italian cities against the emperors, Rimini sided with the latter.


title: Rimini

text: In the 13th century, it suffered from the discords of the Gambacari and Ansidei families. The city became a municipality in the 14th century, and with the arrival of the religious orders, numerous convents and churches were built, providing work for many illustrious artists. In fact, Giotto inspired the 14th-century School of Rimini, which was the expression of original cultural ferment.


title: Rimini

text: The House of Malatesta emerged from the struggles between municipal factions with Malatesta da Verucchio, who in 1239 was named podestà (chief magistrate) of the city. Despite interruptions, his family held authority until 1528. In 1312 he was succeeded by Malatestino Malatesta, first "signore" (lord) of the city and Pandolfo I Malatesta, the latter's brother, named by Louis IV, Holy Roman Emperor, as imperial vicar of Romagna.


title: Rimini

text: Ferrantino, son of Malatesta II (1335), was opposed by his cousin Ramberto and by Cardinal Bertrand du Pouget (1331), legate of Pope John XXII. Malatesta II was also lord of Pesaro. He was succeeded by Malatesta Ungaro (1373) and Galeotto I Malatesta, uncle of the former (1385), lord also of Fano (from 1340), Pesaro, and Cesena (1378).


title: Rimini

text: His son, Carlo I Malatesta, one of the most respected condottieri of the time, enlarged the Riminese possessions and restored the port. Carlo died childless in 1429, and the lordship was divided into three parts, Rimini going to Galeotto Roberto Malatesta, a Catholic zealot inadequate for the position.


title: Rimini

text: The Pesarese line of the Malatestas tried, in fact, to take advantage of his weakness and to capture the city, but Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, Carlo's nephew, who was only 14 at the time, intervened to save it. Galeotto retired to a convent, and Sigismondo obtained the rule of Rimini.


title: Rimini

text: Sigismondo Pandolfo was the most famous lord of Rimini. In 1433, Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor, sojourned in the city and for a while he was the commander-in-chief of the Papal armies. A skilled general, Sigismondo often acted as "condottiero" for other states to gain money to embellish it (he was also a dilettante poet). He had the famous Tempio Malatestiano rebuilt by Leon Battista Alberti. However, after the rise of Pope Pius II, he had to fight constantly for the independence of the city.


title: Rimini

text: In 1463, he was forced to submit to Pius II, who left him only Rimini and little more; Roberto Malatesta, his son (1482), under Pope Paul II, nearly lost his state, but under Pope Sixtus IV, became the commanding officer of the pontifical army against Ferdinand of Naples. Sigismondo was, however, defeated by Neapolitan forces in the battle of Campomorto (1482). Pandolfo IV, his son (1500), lost Rimini to Cesare Borgia, after whose overthrow it fell to Venice (1503–1509), but it was later retaken by Pope Julius II and incorporated into the Papal States.


title: Rimini

text: After the death of Pope Leo X, Pandolfo returned for several months, and with his son Sigismondo Malatesta held a rule which looked tyrannous even for the time. Pope Adrian VI expelled him again and gave Rimini to the Duke of Urbino, the pope's vicar in Romagna.


title: Rimini

text: In 1527, Sigismondo managed to regain the city, but in the following year the Malatesta dominion died forever.


title: Rimini

text: At the beginning of the 16th century, Rimini, now a secondary town of the Papal States, was ruled by an Apostolic Legate. Towards the end of the 16th century, the municipal square (now Piazza Cavour), which had been closed off on a site where the Poletti Theatre was subsequently built, was redesigned. The statue of Pope Paul V has stood in the centre of the square next to the fountain since 1614.


title: Rimini

text: In the 16th century, the 'grand square' (now the Piazza Tre Martiri in honor of three civilians hanged by the retreating Nazis at the end of World War II), which was where markets and tournaments were held, underwent various changes. A small temple dedicated to Saint Anthony of Padua and a clock tower were built there, giving the square its present shape and size.


title: Rimini

text: Until the 18th century raiding armies, earthquakes, famines, floods and pirate attacks ravaged the city. In this gloomy situation and due to a weakened local economy, fishing took on great importance, a fact testified by the construction of structures such as the fish market and the lighthouse.


title: Rimini

text: In 1797, Rimini, along with the rest of Romagna, was affected by the passage of the Napoleonic army and became part of the Cisalpine Republic. Napoleonic policy suppressed the monastic orders, confiscating their property and thus dispersing a substantial heritage, and demolished many churches including the ancient cathedral of Santa Colomba.


title: Rimini

text: On 30 March 1815, Joachim Murat launched his Rimini Proclamation to the Italian people from here, hoping to incite them to unity and independence. In 1845, a band of adventurers commanded by Ribbotti entered the city and proclaimed a constitution which was soon abolished. In 1860, Rimini and Romagna were incorporated into the Kingdom of Italy.


title: Rimini

text: The city was transformed after the 1843 founding of the first bathing establishment and the Kursaal, a building constructed to host sumptuous social events, became the symbol of Rimini's status as a tourist resort.


title: Rimini

text: In just a few years, the seafront underwent considerable development work making Rimini 'the city of small villas'. At the beginning of the 20th century, The Grand Hotel, the city's first major accommodation facility, was built near the beach.


title: Rimini

text: During the first World War, Rimini and its surrounding infrastructure was one of the primary targets of the Austro-Hungarian Navy. After Italy's declaration of war on 15 May 1915, the Austro-Hungarian fleet left its harbours the same day and started its assault on the Adriatic coast between Venice and Barletta.


title: Rimini

text: During World War II, the city was torn apart by heavy bombardments and by the passage of the front over the Gothic Line during the Battle of Rimini and was eventually captured by Greek and Canadian forces. Following its liberation on 21 September 1944, reconstruction work began, culminating in huge development of the tourist industry in the city.


title: Rimini

text: Rimini is situated at 44°03′00″ north and 12°34′00″ east, along the coast of the Adriatic sea, at the southeastern edge of Emilia-Romagna, at a short distance from Montefeltro and Marche. Rimini extends for 135.71 square km and borders the municipalities of Bellaria-Igea Marina, San Mauro Pascoli, and Santarcangelo di Romagna towards NW, Verucchio and Serravalle, San Marino towards SW, Coriano towards S, and Riccione towards SE. The city is also located at the intersection of three Roman roads: Via Emilia, Via Popilia, and Via Flaminia. Viserba is the most important of Rimini's northern districts, with 8,556 inhabitants.


title: Rimini

text: Rimini is located in a historically strategic position, at the extreme southern edge of the Po Valley, at the junction point of Northern and Central Italy.


title: Rimini

text: It is surrounded towards southwest by the gently rolling hills of Covignano (153 metres high), Vergiano (81 m), San Martino Monte l'Abbate (57 m) and San Lorenzo in Correggiano (60 m), widely cultivated, with vineyards, olive groves and orchards, and dominated by ancient mansions. These hills, mostly made of clay and sand, connect the plains, created by the Marecchia and Ausa, the two most important rivers of Rimini territory, to the higher hills of the Apennines.


title: Rimini

text: The Marecchia river runs through its valley and the plain in a very large riverbed and, after confluence with the Ausa, it flows into the Adriatic sea through a deviator between San Giuliano Mare and Rivabella, while the ancient riverbed is used in its last section as the city's harbour.


title: Rimini

text: The Marecchia, usually with little water flow, was subjected to periodic, destructive floods near its mouth, where the riverbed became narrow after various bends: for this reason it was deviated north. Ausa creek, which was the eastern limit of Rimini for many centuries, was deviated as well after World War II, and its original riverbed was filled and turned into an urban park.


title: Rimini

text: The coastal strip, made of recent marine deposits, is edged by a fine sandy beach, 15 km long and up to 200 metres wide, interrupted only by the mouth of the rivers and gently shelving towards the sea. Along the coastline there is a low sandy cliff, created by sea rise around 4000 B.C., partly conserved north of Rimini, between Rivabella and Bellaria-Igea Marina, at a distance of about 1,300 metres from the coast.


title: Rimini

text: Rimini's territory, for its geographical position and its climatic features, is situated on the edge between the mediterranean and the central European phytoclimatic zones, and thus it represents an environment of notable naturalistic value.


title: Rimini

text: Rimini is the main centre of a long coastal conurbation, which extends from Cervia to Gabicce Mare, including the seaside resorts of Cesenatico, Gatteo a Mare, Bellaria-Igea Marina, Riccione, Misano Adriatico and Cattolica. The conurbation has about 300,000 inhabitants and originated around the mid-20th century due to urban sprawl following intensive tourism development.


title: Rimini

text: The city of Rimini includes the seaside localities and districts of Torre Pedrera, Viserbella, Viserba, Rivabella, San Giuliano Mare towards north and Bellariva, Marebello, Rivazzurra, Miramare towards south. These districts are important to tourism in Rimini.


title: Rimini

text: The city proper includes the historic centre, the four ancient boroughs of S. Giuliano, S. Giovanni, S. Andrea and Marina, the seaside district of Marina Centro and various modern districts—Celle, Marecchiese, INA Casa, V PEEP, Colonnella, Lagomaggio—and outer suburbs such as Padulli, Spadarolo, Covignano, Grottarossa and Villaggio 1° Maggio, located outside of the Adriatic Highway beltline. More outer suburbs are S. Giustina, S. Vito, Spadarolo, Vergiano, Corpolò and Gaiofana.


title: Rimini

text: The historic centre of Rimini, surrounded by the city walls built by Malatesta, and formerly bounded by the Marecchia and Ausa rivers, has a distinctive, regular urban structure of Roman origins. It was divided since the Middle Ages in four districts (Rioni): Cittadella, Clodio, Pomposo and Montecavallo. The boundaries of these districts are not known, but it is assumed that they followed the current Corso d'Augusto, Via Garibaldi, and Via Gambalunga. Additionally, the ancient coastline was situated much farther inland than today's; it gradually shifted outward over centuries and the new land was developed throughout the 20th century.


title: Rimini

text: Rione Cittadella, in the western area of the centre, was the most important district of the city and included the Municipal palaces, Castel Sismondo and the Cathedral of Santa Colomba. Rione Clodio, towards the north, was popular and a peculiar urban structure tied with the near Marecchia river. Rione Pomposo, the widest district of the city, included large orchards and convents. Rione Montecavallo, on the southern part of the historical centre, is characterized by bowed, irregular streets of medieval origins, by the Fossa Patara creek and a small hill called "Montirone".


title: Rimini

text: Outside of the city walls, there are four boroughs (Borghi), which were entirely incorporated to the city by the urban sprawl in the early 20th century.


title: Rimini

text: Borgo S. Giuliano, along Via Emilia, dates back to the 11th century and was originally a fishermen's settlement. Dominated by the Church of San Giuliano, it is one of the most picturesque spots of the city, with narrow streets and squares, colourful small houses and many frescoes representing characters and places of Federico Fellini's films.


title: Rimini

text: Borgo S. Giovanni, on both sides of Via Flaminia, was populated by artisans and middle-class; Borgo S. Andrea, located outside of Porta Montanara, along Via Covignano, Via Montefeltro and Via Monte Titano, was strictly tied with agriculture and commerce of cows. Both these two boroughs were developed in the 15th century; then they burned in a fire in 1469 and were rebuilt in the 19th century, relocating small industries and manufactures, including a brick factory and a phosphorus matches factory.


title: Rimini

text: Borgo Marina, situated on the right bank of the Marecchia, was a portal borough, heavily transformed by Fascist demolitions and World War II bombings, which hit this area due to its proximity to the bridges and railway station of the city.


title: Rimini

text: Rimini has a humid subtropical climate (Köppen: Cfa) moderated by the influence of the Adriatic sea, featuring autumn and winter mean temperatures and annual low temperatures among the very highest in Emilia-Romagna.


title: Rimini

text: Precipitations are equally distributed during the year, with a peak in October (75 mm) and two slight minimums, in January (42 mm) and July (43 mm). In spring, autumn and winter precipitations mainly come from oceanic fronts, while in summer they are brought by thunderstorms, coming from the Apennines or the Po Valley.


title: Rimini

text: Humidity is high all year round, averaging a minimum of 72% in June and July and a maximum of 84% in November and December. Prevailing winds blow from W, S, E and NE. Southwesterly winds, known as libeccio or garbino, are foehn winds, which may bring warm temperatures in each season. On average, there are over 2,040 sunshine hours per year.


title: Rimini

text: , Rimini has 150,951 inhabitants, with a density of about 1,100 inhabitants per square kilometre within the city limits.


title: Rimini

text: In 1861, by the time of the first Italian census, the population was around 28,000; in 1931 it was more than double, 57,000.


title: Rimini

text: With the increasing tourism development, population rapidly grew between 1951 and 1981, the fastest growing period for Rimini in the 20th century, when the city's population grew from 77,000 to over 128,000.


title: Rimini

text: During the 20th century, two former districts of Rimini got administrative autonomy, causing two distinct temporary drops in population totals: Riccione in 1922 and Bellaria-Igea Marina in 1956.


title: Rimini

text: Foreign population is 18,396, (12.5% of the total), mainly from Eastern Europe, East Asia and North Africa. Between 1992 and 2014, foreign population grew from around 1,800 to over 18,000 units.


title: Rimini

text: The most important foreign communities are Albanians (3,479), Romanians (2,904), Ukrainians (2,409), Chinese (1,197) and Moldovans (1,023). Other notable foreign groups in the city are Senegalese, Moroccans, Macedonians, Tunisians, Russians, Bangladeshis and Peruvians.


title: Rimini

text: Rimini's population is mostly Catholic. The city is the seat of the Diocese of Rimini, a suffragan of the Archdiocese of Ravenna-Cervia.


title: Rimini

text: The first cathedral of the diocese was the former Cathedral of Santa Colomba until 1798, when the title was transferred to the church of Sant'Agostino. Since 1809, Rimini's cathedral is the Tempio Malatestiano.


title: Rimini

text: Besides Roman Catholic churches, there are also Orthodox, Evangelical and Adventist churches. Between the 13th and 14th century, Rimini had a flourishing Jewish community, which built three distinct synagogues, all destroyed, formerly located around the area of Piazza Cavour, Via Cairoli and Santa Colomba.


title: Rimini

text: Rimini is a major international tourist destination and seaside resort, among the most well known in Europe and the Mediterranean basin, thanks to a long sandy beach, well-equipped bathing establishments, theme parks and a number of opportunities for leisure and spare time. The economy of the city is mainly based on tourism, whose development started in the first half of the 19th century and increased after World War II.


title: Rimini

text: Rimini's origins as a seaside resort date back to 1843, when the first "Bathing Establishment" was founded, the oldest one of the Adriatic Sea. The width of the beach, the gentle gradient of the sea bed, the equipment of bathing establishments, the luxurious hotels, the mildness of the climate, the richness of curative waters, the prestigious social events, made Rimini a renowned tourist destination among the Italian and European aristocracy during the Belle Époque.


title: Rimini

text: Tourism in Rimini started as therapeutic stay (thalassotherapy, hydrotherapy and heliotherapy), evolving into elite vacation in the late 19th century, into middle-class tourism during the fascist era and finally into mass tourism in the postwar period.


title: Rimini

text: Rimini concentrates about a quarter of Emilia-Romagna's hotels, with over 1,000 hotels, more than 220 of which are open all year round, aside from apartment hotels, apartments, holiday homes, bed & breakfast and campings. Tourism is mainly based on seaside holidays, but also includes trade fairs and conventions, events, nightlife, culture, wellness, food and wine.


title: Rimini

text: Rimini is a leading trade fair and convention site in Italy, with an important trade fair (Rimini Fiera) and a convention centre (Palacongressi di Rimini).


title: Rimini

text: The city's other economic sectors, such as services, commerce, construction industry, have been influenced by the development of tourism. Commerce is one of the main economic sectors, thanks to the presence of a large wholesale center, two hypermarkets, department stores, supermarkets and hundreds of shops and boutiques. Industry, less developed than tourism and services, includes various companies active in food industry, woodworking machineries, building constructions, furnishing, clothing and publishing. Notable companies are Bimota (motorcycles), SCM (woodworking machines), Trevi S.p.A. (electronic goods). Rimini is also seat of a historic railway works plant.


title: Rimini

text: Agriculture and fishing were the city's main economic sources until the early 20th century. The most common crops, in terms of surface area, are alfalfa, wheat, durum wheat, grape vine, olive tree, barley and sorghum. Among fruit trees dominates apricot, peach and plum trees. Important are the traditional productions of wine (Sangiovese, Trebbiano, Rebola, Pagadebit, Albana wines) and extra virgin olive oil.


title: Rimini

text: The fishing industry can count on a fleet of about 100 fishing boats, the most consistent of Rimini's fishing department, which includes the coast between Cattolica and Cesenatico.


title: Rimini

text: The "City Museum" (Museo della Città), main museal institution of Rimini, was inaugurated as "Archaeology Gallery", at the ground floor of Palazzo Gambalunga in 1872, thanks to Riminese historian Luigi Tonini, active in researching and studying the local archaeological heritage. The Archaeology Gallery was the first museum of the city and was conceived as a collection of Etruscan civilization and Roman antiquities, found in Rimini and in the surrounding countryside.


title: Rimini

text: The civic museum was arranged in San Francesco monastery in 1923 and in 1938 was enlarged with a section of Medieval Art. The objects avoided the destructions of World War II, being moved between 1940 and 1943 to two different shelters in Spadarolo and Novafeltria. In 1964, the collections were moved to Palazzo Visconti and finally, from 1990, to the Collegio dei Gesuiti, a large Jesuit convent designed by bolognese architect Alfonso Torreggiani, built in 1749.


title: Rimini

text: In the Archaeological department are exhibited grave goods from Villanovian tombs of Verucchio and Covignano, architectural pieces, sculptures, mosaics, ceramics, coins of Republican and Imperial eras, and the exceptional medical kit from the Domus del Chirurgo. The collection of the Roman Lapidary, exhibited in the inner courtyard of the convent, has funerary monuments, epigraphies and milestones.


title: Rimini

text: The Medieval and Modern Art departments include collections of paintings, sculptures and art objects by artists from Romagna (Giovanni da Rimini, Giuliano da Rimini, Guido Cagnacci), Emilia (Guercino, Vittorio Maria Bigari), Tuscany (Domenico Ghirlandaio, Agostino di Duccio) and Veneto (Giovanni Bellini), from 14th to 19th century. The City Museum arranges temporary exhibitions and promotes researches, study and restoration activities of the city's historical and artistic heritage.


title: Rimini

text: The "Fellini Museum" (Museo Fellini), dedicated to Federico Fellini, houses temporary exhibitions of documents, drawings, scenographies and costumes related to the movie production of the film director.


title: Rimini

text: The "Museum of Glances" (Museo degli Sguardi), housed in Villa Alvarado, on Covignano hill, was instituted in 2005 acquiring the objects of the former Museum of Extra European Cultures "Dinz Rialto", founded in Rimini in 1972 by explorer Delfino Dinz Rialto, the art pieces of the former Missionary Museum of the Grazie and other private collections. The museum has over 3,000 objects coming from China, Oceania, Africa and pre-Columbian America, with paintings, sculptures, everyday objects, totems, masks, musical instruments and clothes illustrating how the Western world has looked at these territories' cultures through history.


title: Rimini

text: The "Museum of Small Fishing and Marine" (Museo della Piccola Pesca e della Marineria), in Viserbella, shows the history of Rimini's Marine through a collection of boats, fishing tools, photographs and a large seashells collection, with pieces from all over the Mediterranean Sea.


title: Rimini

text: In the municipality of Rimini there are also two private museums: the "Aviation Museum" (Museo dell'Aviazione) in Sant'Aquilina, close to the boundary of the Republic of San Marino, and the "National Museum of Motorcycle" (Museo Nazionale del Motociclo) in Casalecchio.


title: Rimini

text: The Gambalunghiana Library, historic institution founded in 1617 by jurist Alessandro Gambalunga, plays a leading role in the city's cultural life. The library has over 280,000 books, including 60,000 ancient books, 1,350 manuscripts, 6,000 prints and 80,000 photographs. Among the incunables, dated back from the 15th century, stand out "De Claris mulieribus" (1497) by Giacomo Filippo Foresti and "De re militari" by Roberto Valturio. The collection of illuminated manuscripts, coming from different cultural and linguistic European boundaries, includes the "Regalis Historia" by Frate Leonardo and "De Civitate Dei" by Saint Augustine.


title: Rimini

text: The first stable theatre in Rimini is documented since 1681, when the city council decided on the transformation of the Arengo's main hall into a large theatre hall, hosting shows of amateur dramatics companies and the young Carlo Goldoni, who was studying philosophy in the city at that time.


title: Rimini

text: Between 1842 and 1857 the great Municipal Theatre Vittorio Emanuele II was built, designed in Neoclassical style by the architect Luigi Poletti, according to the traditional canons of the 19th-century Italian theatre. The theatre was inaugurated by Giuseppe Verdi, who directed "L'Aroldo", and hosted prestigious opera seasons until its destruction in 1943 due to aerial bombings. Since 1947, it has been called Amintore Galli Theatre. Since its closure, theatre shows has been hosted in the modern Teatro Ermete Novelli in Marina Centro.


title: Rimini

text: Rimini appeared on the movie screen for the first time in some early footages, such as the documentary "Rimini l'Ostenda d'Italia" (1912), and in various Istituto Luce's newsreels in the Thirties. The film director Federico Fellini, was born and raised in Rimini, portrayed characters, places and atmospheres of his hometown through his movies, which however were almost entirely shot in Cinecittà's studios in Rome: I Vitelloni, 8 e ½ (Oscar award in 1964), I clowns, Amarcord (Oscar award in 1975). Other Italian movies filmed in Rimini includes "La prima notte di quiete" by Valerio Zurlini, "Rimini Rimini" by Sergio Corbucci, "Abbronzatissimi" by Bruno Gaburro, "Sole negli occhi" by Andrea Porporati, "Da zero a dieci" by Luciano Ligabue and "Non pensarci" by Gianni Zanasi.


title: Rimini

text: The earliest musician from Rimini was Saint Arduino (10th century); a musical tradition of some distinction was witnessed in the following century by the presence of a music school, named "Scuola cantorum", at the Cathedral of Santa Colomba. French composer Guillaume Dufay stayed in Rimini, at Malatesta's court until 1427. In 1518 Pietro Aaron became the first choirmaster of the Cathedral's chapel. In 1690 Carlo Tessarini, violinist and composer, was born in Rimini. The city also gave birth to the musician Benedetto Neri, professor at the Academy of Music in Milan.


title: Rimini

text: Amintore Galli, illustrious musicologist and composer born in Talamello in 1845, attended the city's Classical Lyceum before moving to Milan, where he studied at the Academy of Music; in 1945 the Municipal Theatre of Rimini was dedicated to him.


title: Rimini

text: Between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many social events and dance parties took place at the Bathing Establishment, hosting celebrities such as soprano Elena Bianchini-Cappelli and tenor Enrico Caruso.


title: Rimini

text: In recent years, the city inspired the homonymous music album by Fabrizio De André, released in 1978, and it is cited in various popular Italian and foreign songs by Fabrizio De André, Francesco Guccini, Nino Rota, Elvis Costello, Fred Buscaglione. Also born in Rimini were the songwriter Samuele Bersani and the composer and music producer Carlo Alberto Rossi, author of some of Mina's songs.


title: Rimini

text: Rimini's cuisine is simple and characterized by intense flavours and it is indissolubly related to the traditions of rural culture, influenced by the city's location—between the sea and the hills and near the border between Romagna and Marche.


title: Rimini

text: The traditional first course is pasta, which includes regular pasta, pasta in broth and baked pasta, prepared in many different shapes. Almost all pasta dishes require a base of "sfoglia", a dough of eggs and flour, handmade with a rolling pin. First courses include cappelletti, passatelli in broth, lasagne, cannelloni, nidi di rondine, ravioli, tagliatelle, garganelli, maltagliati, gnocchi and strozzapreti, seasoned with bolognese sauce or a dressing of butter and sage.


title: Rimini

text: Second courses include meat dishes, such as pollo alla cacciatora, rabbit in porchetta, meat-filled zucchini, sausages and mixed grilled meats, and fish dishes, like barbecues of atlantic mackerels, sardines, rotisseries of oily fishes, sepias with peas, fried squids and gianchetti (known here as "omini nudi").


title: Rimini

text: Piada is a flatbread of ancient traditions, thin and crumbly, obtained from a dough of flour, water, lard and salt, and baked on a scorching "testo" of terracotta or cast iron. It is often accompanied by grilled meats or fishes, sausages, gratinée vegetables, salami, prosciutto, fresh cheeses and country herbs. Cassoni are stuffed flatbreads similar to piada, with various fillings: country herbs, potatoes and sausages, tomato and mozzarella. Side dishes include mixed salads, gratinée vegetables, roasted potatoes, sautée bladder campion leaves, marinated olives with dill, garlic and orange zest.


title: Rimini

text: Traditional desserts are ciambella, Carnevale's fried fiocchetti and castagnole, piada dei morti (a doughnut with walnuts, raisins, pinenuts and almonds, prepared in November), zuppa inglese (a rich dessert with custard, savoiardi and liqueurs), caramelized figs, peaches in white wine and strawberries in red wine.


title: Rimini

text: Typical local products are "squacquerone" (a fresh cheese) and saba, a grape syrup used to prepare desserts. Quality extra virgin olive oil is traditionally produced in Rimini area since ancient times.


title: Rimini

text: The wines include Sangiovese, Trebbiano, Pagadebit, Rebola, Cabernet Sauvignon and Albana, a dessert wine of Roman origins.


title: Rimini

text: Rimini has a varied historical and artistic heritage which includes churches and monasteries, villas and palaces, fortifications, archaeological sites, streets and squares, as a result of the succession of various civilizations, dominations and historical events through its history, from the Romans to the Byzantines, the medieval "comune", the Malatesta seignory, the Venetian Republic and the Papal States dominations.


title: Rimini

text: The city has always been a key gate to the Orient and the southern areas of the Mediterranean for the Po Valley, thanks to its geographical position and its harbour, and a meeting point between cultures of Northern and Central Italy.


title: Rimini

text: Rimini has monuments of different eras, with important examples of architecture from the Roman age, such as the Arch of Augustus, the Tiberius Bridge, the Amphitheatre and the Domus del Chirurgo; from the Middle Ages, such as the Palazzo dell'Arengo, the church of Sant'Agostino and Castel Sismondo; from the Renaissance, with the Tempio Malatestiano, masterpiece of Leon Battista Alberti.


title: Rimini

text: Rimini's archaeological heritage includes some domus of Republican and Imperial age, characterized by polychrome or black and white mosaics, necropolis and sections of the pavement of the ancient Roman streets.


title: Rimini

text: The city, along with its boroughs and the seaside district of Marina Centro, also preserves buildings from the Baroque, the Neoclassical and Art Nouveau periods, with churches, palaces, hotels and mansions which reveal its role of cultural and trading centre and seaside resort.


title: Rimini

text: The city centre has a Roman structure, partly modified by following medieval transformations. Urban evolution, through the renovation of the Malatesta, earthquakes and the suppressions of monasteries, has led to a stratification of historic sites and buildings. The bombings of World War II caused extensive destruction and damage, compromising the monumental heritage and the integrity of the city centre, which has been reconstructed and restored in order to valorize its historic places and buildings.


title: Rimini

text: Rimini has an extensive parks system, with 1.3 million square metres of parks and gardens inside the urban area and a total of 2.8 million square metres of green areas inside the city limits, including river parks, sport facilities and natural areas.


title: Rimini

text: The city's park system includes a series of large urban parks, created along the old riverbeds of Marecchia and Ausa, neighbourhood parks and gardens and tree-lined boulevards.


title: Rimini

text: The main parks of the city are XXV Aprile Park, Giovanni Paolo II Park, Alcide Cervi Park, Fabbri Park, Ghirlandetta Park, Federico Fellini Park, Pertini Park in Marebello and Briolini Park in San Giuliano Mare. Every Saturday, XXV Aprile Park hosts one of the Italy's thirteen (as of 2022) parkruns.


title: Rimini

text: In Rimini there are about 42,000 public trees, belonging to 190 different species, predominantly linden, planes, maples, poplars, pines and oaks. 23 of these are old trees, protected as "monumental trees" for their age and their naturalistic value, such as the plane of piazza Malatesta, the downy oak of Giovanni Paolo II Park, the cypresses of Sant'Agostino, the elm of Viale Vespucci and the linden trees of San Fortunato.


title: Rimini

text: The city's cycling network is articulated inside the main parks and boulevards, linking the most important monuments, tourist attractions, beaches, meeting places, offering various opportunities to different use categories, including urban travels, mountain bike and cyclotourism.


title: Rimini

text: The urban cycling network is connected, through XXV Aprile Park, to the cycle route which links Rimini and Saiano, along the river Marecchia.


title: Rimini

text: Rimini is the seat of a Campus of University of Bologna, attended by 5,800 students, which include bachelors and masters belonging to eight Faculties: Economics, Statistical Sciences, Pharmacy, Literature and Philosophy, Industrial Chemistry, Sport Sciences, Medicine and Surgery.


title: Rimini

text: The city has public schools of all levels, including 13 nurseries, 12 kindergartens, 39 primary schools, 5 secondary schools and 11 high schools (4 Lyceums, 3 Technical Institutes, 3 Professional Institutes and an Institute of Musical Studies). The most ancient city's Lyceum, the Classical Lyceum "Giulio Cesare", founded in 1800, was attended by Giovanni Pascoli and Federico Fellini.


title: Rimini

text: Rimini is an important road and railway junction, thanks to its position at the intersection between the Adriatic coastal routes and the Po Valley ones and its proximity to the Republic of San Marino.


title: Rimini

text: The Adriatic motorway (A14) connects Rimini to Bologna towards north and Taranto towards south, through the tolls of Rimini Nord and Rimini Sud. Rimini is a junction of three highways of Roman origins: the Via Emilia (SS 9) to Milan, the Via Flaminia (SS 16) to Rome and the Via Popilia (SS 16) to Padova.


title: Rimini

text: The Rimini–San Marino Highway (SS 72) connects the Adriatic Riviera to the capital of the Republic of San Marino, entering the Sammarinese territory after the State limit at Dogana.


title: Rimini

text: Via Marecchiese (SP 258), leading to Sansepolcro, passes through the Apennines at Viamaggio Pass and links Rimini to its hinterland, Tuscany and the Tiber Valley. Roads of local importance are the provincial roads to Coriano (SP 31), Montescudo (SP 41) and Santa Cristina (SP 69).


title: Rimini

text: Rimini is a major junction of the regional railway network and it is one of the main stations of the Adriatic railway. Rimini Station is a junction of the railroad lines Bologna-Ancona and Ferrara-Ravenna-Rimini, and trains of all categories stop there, including Frecciarossa and Frecciabianca.


title: Rimini

text: It is also the ending point of long-distance railway services to Rome and of regional services to Bologna, Castelbolognese, Ancona and Ravenna.


title: Rimini

text: Rimini also has four minor railway stations: Miramare, Viserba, Torre Pedrera, served by regional services, and Rimini Fiera, periodically served by regional and intercity services in conjunction with the main trade fairs.


title: Rimini

text: The city is served by the Federico Fellini International Airport, at Miramare, the second largest airport in Emilia-Romagna by passenger traffic. It has regular links to national and international hubs, low cost, charter and seasonal flights.


title: Rimini

text: The network of urban transport, operated by START Romagna, includes 13 urban bus lines, nine suburban bus lines, as well as two lines connecting Rimini city centre with the nearby seaside resort of Riccione: a trolleybus line and since November 2019, the Metromare bus rapid transit line.


title: Rimini

text: To prevent most of the temporary sea bathing prohibitions occurring when wastewater is discharged into the sea in case of heavy rainfall or thunderstorms, in 2013 extensive work began to upgrade the sewage system, which is expected to be completed in 2024. The works done between 2013 and 2020 made it possible to eliminate nearly all temporary sea bathing prohibitions in Marina Centro, Viserba, in the southern parts of Viserbella and in the northern parts of both Rivabella and Torre Pedrera, in addition to coastal areas that were already not affected, such as northern Marina Centro, southern Bellariva, Marebello, northern Rivazzurra and central Torre Pedrera.


title: Rimini

text: Waste management is operated by the multi-utility company Hera Group. Waste sorting attained 71,8% in 2020.


title: Rimini

text: The main football team of the city is Rimini Calcio. It played for nine years (between 1976 and 2009) in Serie B, the second-highest division in the Italian football league system. Its better positioning was the fifth place of the 2006–07 season (when Rimini was also undefeated in both games against Juventus).


title: Rimini

text: Rimini has also a notable basketball team, the Basket Rimini Crabs, which played for several years in Serie A and two times in the European Korać Cup. About baseball, Rimini Baseball Club won 12 national championships and it was also European champion three times.


title: Rimini

text: Rimini is the site of the annual Paganello event, one of the world's premier Beach Ultimate tournaments.


title: Gene Barry

text: Gene Barry (born Eugene Klass, June 14, 1919 – December 9, 2009) was an American stage, screen, and television actor and singer. Barry is best remembered for his leading roles in the films "The Atomic City" (1952) and "The War of The Worlds" (1953) and for his portrayal of the title characters in the TV series "Bat Masterson" and "Burke's Law", among many roles.


title: Gene Barry

text: Barry was born Eugene Klass on June 14, 1919, in New York City, the son of Eva (née Conn) and Martin Klass; all of his grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Russia. Barry grew up in Brooklyn and attended New Utrecht High School. Barry exhibited early artistic skills with singing and playing violin as a child and later spent two years at the Chatham Square School of Music in Greenwich Village on a scholarship awarded for his vocal ability.


title: Gene Barry

text: Barry chose his professional name in honor of John Barrymore and made his Broadway debut as Captain Paul Duval in the 1942 revival of Sigmund Romberg's "The New Moon". He later portrayed Falke in "Rosalinda" (1942), Nova Kovich in "The Merry Widow" (1943), Lieutenant Bunin in "Catherine Was Great" (1944), Dorante and Comte De Chateau-Gaillard in "The Would-Be Gentleman" (1946), The Doctor in "Happy as Larry" (1950), and played a variety of roles in the musical revue "Bless You All" (1950).


title: Gene Barry

text: In 1950 Barry began appearing on television with the "NBC Television Opera Theatre". In 1955 he appeared on the CBS Television anthology series "Appointment with Adventure".


title: Gene Barry

text: In 1951 Barry was hired for his first movie, in the role of Dr. Frank Addison in "The Atomic City" (1952). In 1953 he was cast as Dr. Clayton Forrester in the science fiction film "The War of the Worlds" (1953). (Much later, Barry also made a cameo appearance in Steven Spielberg's remake of "War of the Worlds" (2005), along with his co-star Ann Robinson from the film of 1953.)


title: Gene Barry

text: When the situation comedy "Our Miss Brooks" was given a change of format in 1955, Barry was cast in a recurring role as the physical education teacher Gene Talbot, the new romantic interest of series star Eve Arden. The show was canceled in 1956, but Barry's character—a ladies' man with expensive tastes—served as the model for three shows in which he later starred.


title: Gene Barry

text: "Bat Masterson", a fictionalized recounting of the life of the real-life U.S. Marshal, gambler, and gunman (Masterson's life as a writer and bon vivant occurred long after the time-frame featured in the series) was broadcast by NBC-TV from 1958 to 1961. (In 1990 Barry recreated the role of Bat Masterson for two episodes of "Guns of Paradise" along with Hugh O'Brian as Wyatt Earp and the following year in "", also with O'Brian as Wyatt Earp.)


title: Gene Barry

text: In his next TV series, "Burke's Law", Barry played a millionaire homicide investigator who was chauffeured in his Rolls Royce as he solved crimes. This series was broadcast on ABC-TV from September 20, 1963, to May 5, 1965. For his performance in it, Barry won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in 1965. In 1965–66, the final season of the series, the title of the show changed to "Amos Burke, Secret Agent". In 1994 a revival of the "Burke's Law" series returned to television for two seasons on CBS. Barry again played in the title role, this time as a widower working with his son Peter (Peter Barton). According to his co-star Gary Conway, who played Det. Tilson in the original series, the two had a lot of fun, on and off camera, despite having some difficulties with each other. After Conway left the show, he remained friends with Barry until his acting mentor's death.


title: Gene Barry

text: Barry's third TV series was "The Name of the Game", in which he played the sophisticated publisher of a family of magazines, and was one of three lead characters. The other two lead actors were Robert Stack and Tony Franciosa, who rotated with Barry week by week as the primary character in each week's program. This series was shown by NBC from 1968 to 1971. One of the magazines that Barry's character published was called "People", several years before the actual "People" began publication.


title: Gene Barry

text: Shortly before the filming of "The Name of the Game" series began, Barry played the villain—a wealthy psychiatrist—in "Prescription: Murder", the two-hour TV movie that became the precursor of the TV series "Columbo."


title: Gene Barry

text: In 1972, Barry starred in the ITV television series "The Adventurer", along with Barry Morse and Catherine Schell. He played Gene Bradley, a government agent of independent means who posed as a glamorous American movie star.


title: Gene Barry

text: Barry returned to Broadway acting on two occasions—in 1962 in "The Perfect Setup" and in 1983 in the Broadway premiere of the musical "La Cage aux Folles". Barry was nominated for a Tony Award for his portrayal of Georges in "Cage".


title: Gene Barry

text: For his contribution to live theatre, Gene Barry received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6555 Hollywood Boulevard. In 1975 Barry bought a home in Palm Springs, California. A Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars was dedicated to him in 1994.


title: Gene Barry

text: On October 22, 1944, at age 25, Barry married Betty Claire Kalb (1923–2003), whom he met on the set of "Catherine Was Great". Kalb was an actress known by the stage name Julie Carson.


title: Gene Barry

text: Barry died on December 9, 2009 at Sunrise Senior Living in Woodland Hills, California, at the age of 90. He was buried at the Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California, with his wife Betty, who died in 2003.


title: Menudo (soup)

text: In Mexican cuisine, Menudo, also known as pancita ("[little] gut" or "[little] stomach") or mole de panza ("stomach sauce"), is a traditional Mexican soup, made with cow's stomach (tripe) in broth with a red chili pepper base. Hominy, lime, onions, and oregano are used to season the broth.


title: Menudo (soup)

text: Menudo is traditionally prepared by the entire family, and often serves as an occasion for social interactions such as after wedding receptions where the families of the newlyweds go to one of their family's houses to enjoy a bowl of menudo before and after the ceremony. It is also believed to be a hangover cure.


title: Menudo (soup)

text: Menudo takes a long time to prepare as the tripe takes hours to cook. It includes many ingredients and side dishes (such as salsa), and is garnished with chopped onions, chiles, cilantro, and often with lime juice; it is often prepared communally and eaten at a feast.


title: Menudo (soup)

text: Documents from the American Works Progress Administration indicate that in the 1930s, among migrant workers in Arizona, menudo parties were held regularly to celebrate births, Christmas, and other occasions.


title: Menudo (soup)

text: Four to seven hours' cooking is required. Beef tripe sellers offer a version of this meat that has been boiled in hot water, which reduces cooking time by hours. In its simplest form, beef tripe is rinsed then boiled for three hours in a large pot with half an onion to remove the strong odor of the tripe. It is then removed from the pot, discarding the onion half, and allowed to cool before being cut into strips, or occasionally diced. The water is discarded, then the tripe is returned to the pot with fresh water, oregano, red chili paste or powder, lime or lemon juice, hominy, and this is boiled.


title: Menudo (soup)

text: The dish is typically served with chopped raw onions, oregano, diced chiles (usually serrano), and lemon or lime segments along with corn or flour tortillas.


title: Menudo (soup)

text: It almost always includes tripe, and some versions of the dish in Mexico also include honeycomb and "librillo" beef along with the feet and tendons. Versions of the dish that include meats other than tripe have a much longer cooking time. Pig's trotters are also used in northern-style menudo, such as in Chihuahua. The feet and tendons are boiled first at low-to-medium heat for about three hours. The tripe is then added with salt, a half onion, and one or two heads of garlic. Red menudo also includes guajillo chili paste. The menudo is boiled for a further three hours while covered. Once it is almost done, the hominy is added.


title: Menudo (soup)

text: There are a number of regional variations on menudo. In northern Mexico, hominy is typically added. In northwest states such as Sinaloa and Sonora usually only the "blanco," (white) variation is seen; "menudo blanco" is the same dish, but red pepper is not added (though jalapeño or chopped green chilies may be included to replace the spice in the red version), thus giving the broth a clear or white color. Adding "patas" (beef or pig's feet) to the stew is popular in the United States. In some areas of central Mexico, "menudo" refers to a stew of sheep stomach, "pancitas" stew of beef tongue. In south-western Mexico (in and around the Distrito Federal, Morelos, and Guerrero) it is called "panza" or "panza guisada". The red variation is usually seen in the northern state of Chihuahua and Nuevo León . Only yellow hominy is usually used in menudo in Texas. A similar stew made with more easily cooked meat is pozole. Some variations of menudo substitute garbanzo beans instead of hominy.


title: Menudo (soup)

text: In the United States, since the mid-20th century, prepared menudo has been common in food stores and restaurants in cosmopolitan areas and in other areas with a significant Mexican population. Restaurants often feature it as a special on Saturday and Sunday, and some believe menudo alleviates hangovers. Canned menudo is also available.


title: Menudo (soup)

text: An annual Menudo Festival is held in Santa Maria, California. In 2009, more than 2,000 people attended and 13 restaurants competed for prizes in three categories. The festival is organized by the National Latino Peace Officers Association of Northern Santa Barbara County and the money raised goes toward scholarships for local students.


title: Menudo (soup)

text: Since 1996, the Menudo Bowl is an annual event in Laredo, Texas. In 2019, over 30 teams participated to make the best menudo. The event is organized by Laredo Crime Stoppers, with teams conformed by public officials, law enforcement, media representatives, and members of the community. The event is attended by people from both sides of the US–Mexico border.


title: Word2vec

text: Word2vec is a technique for natural language processing (NLP) published in 2013. The word2vec algorithm uses a neural network model to learn word associations from a large corpus of text. Once trained, such a model can detect synonymous words or suggest additional words for a partial sentence. As the name implies, word2vec represents each distinct word with a particular list of numbers called a vector. The vectors are chosen carefully such that they capture the semantic and syntactic qualities of words; as such, a simple mathematical function (cosine similarity) can indicate the level of semantic similarity between the words represented by those vectors.


title: Word2vec

text: Word2vec is a group of related models that are used to produce word embeddings. These models are shallow, two-layer neural networks that are trained to reconstruct linguistic contexts of words. Word2vec takes as its input a large corpus of text and produces a vector space, typically of several hundred dimensions, with each unique word in the corpus being assigned a corresponding vector in the space.


title: Word2vec

text: Word2vec can utilize either of two model architectures to produce these distributed representations of words: continuous bag-of-words (CBOW) or continuous skip-gram. In both architectures, word2vec considers both individual words and a sliding window of context words surrounding individual words as it iterates over the entire corpus. In the continuous bag-of-words architecture, the model predicts the current word from the window of surrounding context words. The order of context words does not influence prediction (bag-of-words assumption). In the continuous skip-gram architecture, the model uses the current word to predict the surrounding window of context words. The skip-gram architecture weighs nearby context words more heavily than more distant context words. According to the authors' note, CBOW is faster while skip-gram does a better job for infrequent words.


title: Word2vec

text: After the model has trained, the learned word embeddings are positioned in the vector space such that words that share common contexts in the corpus — that is, words that are semantically and syntactically similar — are located close to one another in the space. More dissimilar words are located farther from one another in the space.


title: Word2vec

text: This occurs because words which influence relative word probabilities in similar ways will have learned similar embeddings once the model has finished. For example, consider the CBOW framework, which can be thought of as a ‘fill in the blank’ task. The learned embedding for a word will represent the way in which, when that word appears in a context window, it influences the relative probabilities of other words appearing in the ‘blank,’ or the position at the center of the context window. Therefore, words which are semantically similar should influence these probabilities in similar ways, because semantically similar words should be used in similar contexts.


title: Word2vec

text: Word2vec was created, patented, and published in 2013 by a team of researchers led by Tomas Mikolov at Google over two papers. Other researchers helped analyse and explain the algorithm. Embedding vectors created using the Word2vec algorithm have some advantages compared to earlier algorithms such as latent semantic analysis.


title: Word2vec

text: By 2022, the Word2vec approach was described as "dated", with transformer models being regarded as the state of the art in NLP.


title: Word2vec

text: Results of word2vec training can be sensitive to parametrization. The following are some important parameters in word2vec training.


title: Word2vec

text: A Word2vec model can be trained with hierarchical softmax and/or negative sampling. To approximate the conditional log-likelihood a model seeks to maximize, the hierarchical softmax method uses a Huffman tree to reduce calculation. The negative sampling method, on the other hand, approaches the maximization problem by minimizing the log-likelihood of sampled negative instances. According to the authors, hierarchical softmax works better for infrequent words while negative sampling works better for frequent words and better with low dimensional vectors. As training epochs increase, hierarchical softmax stops being useful.


title: Word2vec

text: High-frequency and low-frequency words often provide little information. Words with a frequency above a certain threshold, or below a certain threshold, may be subsampled or removed to speed up training.


title: Word2vec

text: Quality of word embedding increases with higher dimensionality. But after reaching some point, marginal gain diminishes. Typically, the dimensionality of the vectors is set to be between 100 and 1,000.


title: Word2vec

text: The size of the context window determines how many words before and after a given word are included as context words of the given word. According to the authors' note, the recommended value is 10 for skip-gram and 5 for CBOW.


title: Word2vec

text: doc2vec, generates distributed representations of "variable-length" pieces of texts, such as sentences, paragraphs, or entire documents. doc2vec has been implemented in the C, Python and Java/Scala tools (see below), with the Java and Python versions also supporting inference of document embeddings on new, unseen documents.


title: Word2vec

text: doc2vec estimates the distributed representations of documents much like how word2vec estimates representations of words: doc2vec utilizes either of two model architectures, both of which are allegories to the architectures used in word2vec. The first, Distributed Memory Model of Paragraph Vectors (PV-DM), is identical to CBOW other than it also provides a unique document identifier as a piece of additional context. The second architecture, Distributed Bag of Words version of Paragraph Vector (PV-DBOW), is identical to the skip-gram model except that it attempts to predict the window of surrounding context words from the paragraph identifier instead of the current word.


title: Word2vec

text: doc2vec also has the ability to capture the semantic ‘meanings’ for additional pieces of  ‘context’ around words; doc2vec can estimate the semantic embeddings for speakers or speaker attributes, groups, and periods of time. For example, doc2vec has been used to estimate the political positions of political parties in various Congresses and Parliaments in the U.S. and U.K., respectively, and various governmental institutions.


title: Word2vec

text: Another extension of word2vec is top2vec, which leverages both document and word embeddings to estimate distributed representations of topics. top2vec takes document embeddings learned from a doc2vec model and reduces them into a lower dimension (typically using UMAP). The space of documents is then scanned using HDBSCAN, and clusters of similar documents are found. Next, the centroid of documents identified in a cluster is considered to be that cluster’s topic vector. Finally, top2vec searches the semantic space for word embeddings located near to the topic vector to ascertain the 'meaning' of the topic. The word with embeddings most similar to the topic vector might be assigned as the topic’s title, whereas far away word embeddings may be considered unrelated.


title: Word2vec

text: As opposed to other topic models such as LDA, top2vec provides canonical ‘distance’ metrics between two topics, or between a topic and another embeddings (word, document, or otherwise). Together with results from HDBSCAN, users can generate topic hierarchies, or groups of related topics and subtopics.


title: Word2vec

text: Furthermore, a user can use the results of top2vec to infer the topics of out-of-sample documents. After inferring the embedding for a new document, must only search the space of topics for the closest topic vector.


title: Word2vec

text: An extension of word vectors for n-grams in biological sequences (e.g. DNA, RNA, and proteins) for bioinformatics applications has been proposed by Asgari and Mofrad. Named bio-vectors (BioVec) to refer to biological sequences in general with protein-vectors (ProtVec) for proteins (amino-acid sequences) and gene-vectors (GeneVec) for gene sequences, this representation can be widely used in applications of machine learning in proteomics and genomics. The results suggest that BioVectors can characterize biological sequences in terms of biochemical and biophysical interpretations of the underlying patterns. A similar variant, dna2vec, has shown that there is correlation between Needleman–Wunsch similarity score and cosine similarity of dna2vec word vectors.


title: Word2vec

text: An extension of word vectors for creating a dense vector representation of unstructured radiology reports has been proposed by Banerjee et al. One of the biggest challenges with Word2vec is how to handle unknown or out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words and morphologically similar words. If the Word2vec model has not encountered a particular word before, it will be forced to use a random vector, which is generally far from its ideal representation. This can particularly be an issue in domains like medicine where synonyms and related words can be used depending on the preferred style of radiologist, and words may have been used infrequently in a large corpus.


title: Word2vec

text: IWE combines Word2vec with a semantic dictionary mapping technique to tackle the major challenges of information extraction from clinical texts, which include ambiguity of free text narrative style, lexical variations, use of ungrammatical and telegraphic phases, arbitrary ordering of words, and frequent appearance of abbreviations and acronyms. Of particular interest, the IWE model (trained on the one institutional dataset) successfully translated to a different institutional dataset which demonstrates good generalizability of the approach across institutions.


title: Word2vec

text: The reasons for successful word embedding learning in the word2vec framework are poorly understood. Goldberg and Levy point out that the word2vec objective function causes words that occur in similar contexts to have similar embeddings (as measured by cosine similarity) and note that this is in line with J. R. Firth's distributional hypothesis. However, they note that this explanation is "very hand-wavy" and argue that a more formal explanation would be preferable.


title: Word2vec

text: Levy et al. (2015) show that much of the superior performance of word2vec or similar embeddings in downstream tasks is not a result of the models per se, but of the choice of specific hyperparameters. Transferring these hyperparameters to more 'traditional' approaches yields similar performances in downstream tasks. Arora et al. (2016) explain word2vec and related algorithms as performing inference for a simple generative model for text, which involves a random walk generation process based upon loglinear topic model. They use this to explain some properties of word embeddings, including their use to solve analogies.


title: Word2vec

text: The word embedding approach is able to capture multiple different degrees of similarity between words. Mikolov et al. (2013) found that semantic and syntactic patterns can be reproduced using vector arithmetic. Patterns such as "Man is to Woman as Brother is to Sister" can be generated through algebraic operations on the vector representations of these words such that the vector representation of "Brother" - "Man" + "Woman" produces a result which is closest to the vector representation of "Sister" in the model. Such relationships can be generated for a range of semantic relations (such as Country–Capital) as well as syntactic relations (e.g. present tense–past tense).


title: Word2vec

text: This facet of word2vec has been exploited in a variety of other contexts. For example, word2vec has been used to map a vector space of words in one language to a vector space constructed from another language. Relationships between translated words in both spaces can be used to assist with machine translation of new words.


title: Word2vec

text: Mikolov et al. (2013) develop an approach to assessing the quality of a word2vec model which draws on the semantic and syntactic patterns discussed above. They developed a set of 8,869 semantic relations and 10,675 syntactic relations which they use as a benchmark to test the accuracy of a model. When assessing the quality of a vector model, a user may draw on this accuracy test which is implemented in word2vec, or develop their own test set which is meaningful to the corpora which make up the model. This approach offers a more challenging test than simply arguing that the words most similar to a given test word are intuitively plausible.


title: Word2vec

text: The use of different model parameters and different corpus sizes can greatly affect the quality of a word2vec model. Accuracy can be improved in a number of ways, including the choice of model architecture (CBOW or Skip-Gram), increasing the training data set, increasing the number of vector dimensions, and increasing the window size of words considered by the algorithm. Each of these improvements comes with the cost of increased computational complexity and therefore increased model generation time.


title: Word2vec

text: In models using large corpora and a high number of dimensions, the skip-gram model yields the highest overall accuracy, and consistently produces the highest accuracy on semantic relationships, as well as yielding the highest syntactic accuracy in most cases. However, the CBOW is less computationally expensive and yields similar accuracy results.


title: Word2vec

text: Overall, accuracy increases with the number of words used and the number of dimensions. Mikolov et al. report that doubling the amount of training data results in an increase in computational complexity equivalent to doubling the number of vector dimensions.


title: Word2vec

text: Altszyler and coauthors (2017) studied Word2vec performance in two semantic tests for different corpus size. They found that Word2vec has a steep learning curve, outperforming another word-embedding technique, latent semantic analysis (LSA), when it is trained with medium to large corpus size (more than 10 million words). However, with a small training corpus, LSA showed better performance. Additionally they show that the best parameter setting depends on the task and the training corpus. Nevertheless, for skip-gram models trained in medium size corpora, with 50 dimensions, a window size of 15 and 10 negative samples seems to be a good parameter setting.


title: (Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd)

text: (Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd) is the debut album by American rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd, released in 1973. Several of the album's songs remain among the band's most well-known: "Gimme Three Steps", "Simple Man", "Tuesday's Gone", and "Free Bird", the last of which launched the band to national stardom.


title: (Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd)

text: The album was certified gold on December 18, 1974, and double platinum on July 21, 1987, by the RIAA. It peaked at 27 on the "Billboard" 200 in 1975.


title: (Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd)

text: Most of the songs on the album had been in the band's live repertoire for some time. The band found a rural rehearsal space near Jacksonville, Florida, which they nicknamed "Hell House" due to the long hours spent there jamming in the intense Florida heat, and it was there that they composed and ran through the songs endlessly until they were perfected. Producer Al Kooper marveled at how well prepared the band were once they entered the studio; every note was immutable and absolutely no improvisation was allowed.


title: (Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd)

text: Bassist Leon Wilkeson left the band a few months before the album's recording sessions. Ex-Strawberry Alarm Clock guitarist Ed King had been impressed with the band after an earlier incarnation of Lynyrd Skynyrd had opened for Strawberry Alarm Clock in Florida circa 1970. He told vocalist Ronnie Van Zant to keep him in mind if he ever needed a guitarist, and he was invited to replace Wilkeson as bassist. Once the recording sessions were wrapping up, Van Zant decided that King would better serve the band as a guitarist, and he visited Wilkeson and convinced him to rejoin. Wilkeson returned to the band and King moved to lead guitar, giving the band what would become their trademark "Three Guitar Army" along with Allen Collins and Gary Rossington. Wilkeson was back in the band by the time the band shot the cover photo for the album, and appears on the cover, as well as being acknowledged in the liner notes.


title: (Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd)

text: Atlanta Rhythm Section drummer and friend of the band Robert Nix was requested by Van Zant and Kooper to play on the track "Tuesday's Gone".


title: (Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd)

text: As the band worked up "Simple Man" in rehearsal, Kooper expressed his feeling that the song was weak and should not be included on the album. The band felt differently on both counts and could not change Kooper's mind. Ultimately, Van Zant escorted the producer outside to his car and ordered him to remain there until the song was recorded. The band recorded the song on their own with the producer absent from the studio, and it subsequently became one of Lynyrd Skynyrd's best known tracks.


title: (Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd)

text: The album was re-released in 2001 as an expanded version with bonus tracks, including the two B-sides to the original singles and three previously unreleased demos from the album sessions. Sales through 2014 were an estimated two million units internationally.


title: (Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd)

text: The cover photograph was taken on Main Street in Jonesboro, Georgia, and shows, from left to right, Leon Wilkeson (seated), Billy Powell (seated), Ronnie Van Zant, Gary Rossington (seated), Bob Burns, Allen Collins and Ed King. The photo was the last in a long day of shooting for the album cover, and Rossington vomited on the sidewalk seconds after it was taken. To the right of Ed King in the background is a lightning strike in the sky. It is not fabricated and the band did not know it was there until after they saw the released album cover.


title: (Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd)

text: With Ed King's death on August 22, 2018, Rossington is the last surviving member of Lynyrd Skynyrd pictured in this photo.


title: (Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd)

text: "(Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd)" immediately put the band on the rock-and-roll map. Upon its release, rock journalist Robert Christgau acknowledged the quality of the songs and gave the album an "A" rating while referring to Lynyrd Skynyrd as a "staunchly untranscendent band". Kooper, a close friend of Pete Townshend, secured the band a spot opening for The Who on their American tour, and Lynyrd Skynyrd was subsequently exposed to much larger audiences than they had ever seen before.


title: (Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd)

text: In 2012, "Rolling Stone" magazine ranked the album number 403 on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, and it was later ranked number 381 in the 2020 edition.


title: Somalia Battalion

text: The Somalia Battalion () is a separatist military unit of the self-declared Donetsk People's Republic in Ukraine, which has been fighting against the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Donbas War and the 2022 Russian invasion. The battalion's full name is 1st Separate Tank Battalion Somalia (previously 1st Separate Battalion Tactical Group Somalia).


title: Somalia Battalion

text: The Somalia Battalion was formed in 2014 and participated in the Donbas War. The origin of its name is unconfirmed, it could be due to the fact that when its members lined up for the first time, they were dressed in motley, and thus looked not like a combat force, but like Somalia pirates. Or it could be from Givi's claim; "they are as fearless as Somali pirates".


title: Somalia Battalion

text: It was originally a special task force under the Ministry of Defense of the Donetsk People's Republic, a self-proclaimed breakaway state in eastern Ukraine. In 2015 the breakaway states Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk Peoples Republic, and all their military units, were designated as terrorist organisations by the Supreme Court of Ukraine.


title: Somalia Battalion

text: In February 2017, the unit's commander, Mikhail Tolstykh ('Givi'), was assassinated in his office with a RPO-A Shmel rocket launcher. It is alleged he was killed by his own side because he knew who shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, or that he was killed by Ukrainian forces.


title: Somalia Battalion

text: The battalion took part in the Siege of Mariupol alongside Russian forces during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. In 2022, while being decorated by the leader of the Donetsk People's Republic, Denis Pushilin, Senior Lieutenant of the Somalia Battalion Roman Vorobyov allegedly was seen wearing a "Totenkopf" (used by the 3rd SS Panzer Division and by the "SS-Totenkopfverbände") and a "valknut" on his arm patch; both symbols are associated with neo-Nazism. The part of the video showing Vorobyov was later deleted when it was posted on Denis Pushilin's website.


title: Somalia Battalion

text: The battalion has T-64 and T-72 tanks, BMP-1, BTR-70, MT-LB and BRDM-2 armoured fighting vehicles as well as supporting artillery, mortars and transport vehicles.


title: Škorpion

text: The Škorpion vz. 61 (or Sa vz. 61 Skorpion) is a Czechoslovak machine pistol developed in 1959 by Miroslav Rybář (1924–1970) and produced under the official designation Samopal vzor 61 ("submachine gun model 1961") by the Česká zbrojovka arms factory in Uherský Brod from 1963 to 1979.


title: Škorpion

text: Although it was developed for use with security forces, the weapon was also accepted into service with the Czechoslovak Army as a personal sidearm for lower-ranking army staff, vehicle drivers, armoured vehicle personnel and special forces. Currently the weapon is in use with the armed forces of several countries as a sidearm. A variant of the Škorpion, containing a synthetic pistol grip in place of the wooden original, was built under license in Yugoslavia, designated "M84". A civilian, semi-automatic version was also produced, known as the "M84A", also available in .380 ACP (9×17mm Short).


title: Škorpion

text: The Škorpion was developed in the late 1950s by Miroslav Rybář with the working name "model 59". The design was completed in 1961 and named "Samopal Vz. 61".


title: Škorpion

text: It was subsequently adopted by the Czechoslovak Army and security forces, and later exported to various countries.


title: Škorpion

text: It was also used by armed groups, including the Irish Republican Army, Irish National Liberation Army and the Italian Red Brigades. The Brigades used the Škorpion during the 1978 kidnapping of Aldo Moro, also using this weapon to kill Moro.


title: Škorpion

text: In the 1990s the Gang de Roubaix used the Škorpion in a series of attacks in France. In 2017, the Swedish Police Authority estimated that about 50 formerly deactivated weapons from Slovakia were in circulation among criminals in Sweden.


title: Škorpion

text: The Škorpion is a select-fire, straight blowback-operated weapon that fires from the closed bolt position. The cartridge used produces a very low recoil impulse and this enables simple unlocked blowback operation to be employed; there is no delay mechanism and the cartridge is supported only by the inertia of the bolt and the strength of the return springs. When fired, gas pressure drives the case back in the chamber against the resistance provided by the weight of the bolt and its two recoil springs. The bolt travels back, extracting the empty case which is then ejected straight upwards through a port in the receiver housing top cover.


title: Škorpion

text: The Škorpion's compact dimensions were achieved by using a telescopic bolt assembly that wraps around a considerable portion of the barrel. The weapon features a spring-loaded casing extractor, installed inside the bolt head and a fixed, double ejector, which is a protrusion in the weapon's frame.


title: Škorpion

text: As the bolt is relatively light, an inertial rate reducer device housed inside the wooden pistol grip lowers the weapon's rate of fire from 1,000 rounds/min to a more manageable 850 rounds/min. The rate reducer operates as follows: when the bolt reaches the end of its rearward stroke it strikes and is caught by a spring-powered hook mounted on the back plate. At the same time it drives a lightweight, spring-loaded plunger down into the pistol grip. The plunger is easily accelerated and passes through a heavy weight which is left behind because of its inertia. The plunger, having compressed its spring, is driven up again and then meets the descending inertia buffer. This slows down the rising plunger which, when it reaches the top of its travel, rotates the hook, releasing the bolt which is driven forward by the compressed recoil springs.


title: Škorpion

text: The weapon is hammer-fired and has a trigger mechanism with a fire mode selector, whose lever (installed on the left side of the receiver, above the pistol grip) has three settings: "0", weapon is safe; "1", semi-automatic mode and "20", fully automatic fire. The "safe" setting disables the trigger and the bolt in the forward position (by sliding the bolt catch lever upwards).


title: Škorpion

text: The Škorpion uses the 7.65×17mmSR Browning Short (.32 ACP) pistol cartridge, which was the standard service cartridge of the Czechoslovak security forces. It uses two types of double-column curved box magazines: a short 10-round magazine (loaded weight, 0.15 kg) or a 20-round capacity magazine (loaded weight, 0.25 kg). The bolt remains locked open after the last cartridge from the magazine has been fired and can be snapped back forward by pulling the cocking handle knob slightly to the rear.


title: Škorpion

text: The Škorpion is equipped with open-type iron sights (mechanically adjustable forward post and flip rear sight with 75 and 150 m range notches) and a folding metal wire shoulder stock, which folds up and over the receiver and is locked on the front sight's protection capture.


title: Škorpion

text: The Škorpion, together with a short magazine, is carried like a traditional pistol: in a leather holster, and the two spare long magazines are carried in a separate pouch. The weapon comes with a cleaning kit, front sight adjustment tool, oil bottle and lanyard.


title: Škorpion

text: In the 1960s, three other variants of the vz. 61 were developed in Czechoslovakia, though none were mass-produced.


title: Škorpion

text: In the 1990s Česká zbrojovka offered the following submachine guns: the vz. 61 E (.32 ACP version with a plastic pistol grip), the vz. 82 (chambered in 9×18mm Makarov and featuring a 113 mm barrel) and the vz. 83 (for the .380 ACP cartridge). A semi-automatic only variant known as the CZ-91S was developed for the civilian market, available in the aforementioned calibers. The vz. 82, vz. 83 and CZ-91S pistols chambered in 9 mm use straight box magazines.


title: Škorpion

text: The machine pistol Sa vz. 61 Skorpion appeared in many Czech and foreign movies. Czech movies include: "Who's That Soldier?" (1987), "Byl jednou jeden polda III" (1999) and "The Velvet Murderers" (2005). Others include: "Executive Decision" (1996), "Con Air" (1997), "Face/Off" (1997), "The Matrix" (1999), "Blade II" (2002), "Equilibrium" (2002), "xXx" (2002), "The Matrix Revolutions" (2003), "The Dark Knight" (2008), "" (2012) and "" (2014). The Klobb gun from the 1997 video game "GoldenEye 007" is based on the Škorpion.


title: Anaïs Mitchell

text: Anaïs Mitchell (; born March 26, 1981) is an American singer-songwriter, musician, and playwright. Mitchell has released eight studio albums, including "Hadestown" (2010), "Young Man in America" (2012), "Child Ballads" (2013), and "Anaïs Mitchell" (2022).


title: Anaïs Mitchell

text: She developed her album "Hadestown" into a stage musical (together with director Rachel Chavkin), which received its US debut at New York Theatre Workshop in summer 2016, and its Canadian debut at the Citadel Theatre, Edmonton the following year. The show opened at London's National Theatre in November 2018 and then on Broadway on April 17, 2019, at the Walter Kerr Theatre. The Broadway production of "Hadestown" won eight Tony Awards in 2019 including the Tony Award for Best Musical. Mitchell received the Tony Award for Best Original Score; she was also nominated for Best Book of a Musical. The Broadway cast album of the show took home the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album in 2020. Mitchell's first book, "Working on a Song: The Lyrics of Hadestown", was published by Plume Books on October 6, 2020. Mitchell was included in "Time"s 100 Most Influential People of 2020.


title: Anaïs Mitchell

text: Mitchell's father is a novelist and college professor and named her after author Anaïs Nin. She grew up on Treleven farm in Addison County, Vermont. She was raised Quaker. Her mother was Deputy Secretary of Vermont's Agency of Human Services. After traveling to the Middle East, Europe and Latin America as a child, she attended Middlebury College.


title: Anaïs Mitchell

text: Having begun writing her first songs at the age of 17, around 1998, Mitchell won the New Folk award in 2003, when she was 22, at the Kerrville Folk Festival. Her album "Hymns for the Exiled" was released on Chicago's Waterbug Records label in 2004. This recording attracted the attention of singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco, who signed her to the Righteous Babe Records label.


title: Anaïs Mitchell

text: In 2006, Mitchell debuted a draft of her "folk opera" "Hadestown", which she wrote in collaboration with arranger Michael Chorney and director Ben T. Matchstick. A revised version of "Hadestown" was staged in 2007. Her third album, "The Brightness," was released that same year on Righteous Babe Records.


title: Anaïs Mitchell

text: Her album "Hadestown," produced by Todd Sickafoose, was released in spring 2010 to favorable reviews. Described as "the story of Orpheus and Eurydice set in post-apocalyptic Depression-era America, the album includes guest appearances by Ani DiFranco, Greg Brown, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, Ben Knox Miller of The Low Anthem, and The Haden Triplets (Petra, Rachel, and Tanya Haden).


title: Anaïs Mitchell

text: Mitchell continued quietly working on a stage version of "Hadestown" while also writing and recording new material. In early 2012, she released "Young Man in America" on Wilderland Records. Mitchell opened the North American leg of Bon Iver's autumn 2012 tour, which included two sold-out shows at Radio City Music Hall. The album was largely praised by critics as "genre-defying" and her "second consecutive masterpiece."


title: Anaïs Mitchell

text: In late 2012, Mitchell completed recording seven songs from the collection of Child Ballads, compiled by Francis James Child, with fellow musician Jefferson Hamer. The album, produced by Gary Paczosa, was released in February 2013, winning a BBC Radio 2 Folk Award for Best Traditional Song. This was followed in 2014 by "xoa," for which Mitchell re-recorded a number of her older songs using only guitar and vocals. This stripped back album included some songs from "Hadestown" which were recorded for the first time in Mitchell's own voice, as well as three brand new songs.


title: Anaïs Mitchell

text: In summer 2016, the newly expanded theatrical version of "Hadestown" opened at New York Theatre Workshop with Vogue magazine predicting that ""Hadestown" will be your next musical theatre obsession". The following year, it received its Canadian premiere at The Citadel Theatre, Edmonton, and in April 2018, London's National Theatre announced that it would present a three-month run during the winter ahead of the show's Broadway transfer. "Hadestown" opened on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre on April 17, 2019.


title: Anaïs Mitchell

text: In 2019, Mitchell was appearing as part of a three-piece "supergroup" called Bonny Light Horseman, consisting of herself, Eric D. Johnson of Fruit Bats and guitarist Josh Kaufman. The group's self-titled debut album was released on January 24, 2020.


title: Anaïs Mitchell

text: In June 2021, American supergroup Big Red Machine announced their second studio album, "How Long Do You Think It's Gonna Last?", which features Mitchell's guest vocals in three of its tracks: "Latter Days", "Phoenix", and "New Auburn".


title: Anaïs Mitchell

text: Mitchell has received favorable reviews on her musical style, sound and performance. An article in "Acoustic Guitar" magazine calls Mitchell "fearlessly emotive" and compares her to Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Gillian Welch. The UK's "Independent" newspaper called her "the most engaging, and in some ways, most original artist currently working in the field of new American folk music" "The New York Times" noted that "Ms Mitchell's songs address contemporary angst with uncanny vision" and called her "a formidable songwriting talent".


title: Politics of France

text: The politics of France take place with the framework of a semi-presidential system determined by the French Constitution of the French Fifth Republic. The nation declares itself to be an "indivisible, secular, democratic, and social Republic". The constitution provides for a separation of powers and proclaims France's "attachment to the Rights of Man and the principles of National Sovereignty as defined by the Declaration of 1789".


title: Politics of France

text: The political system of France consists of an executive branch, a legislative branch, and a judicial branch. Executive power is exercised by the President of the Republic and the Government. The Government consists of the Prime Minister and ministers. The Prime Minister is appointed by the President, and is responsible to Parliament. The government, including the Prime Minister, can be revoked by the National Assembly, the lower house of Parliament, through a "censure motion"; this ensures that the Prime Minister is always supported by a majority of the lower house (which, on most topics, has prominence over the upper house).


title: Politics of France

text: Parliament consists of the National Assembly and the Senate. It passes statutes and votes on the budget; it controls the action of the executive through formal questioning on the floor of the houses of Parliament and by establishing commissions of inquiry. The constitutionality of the statutes is checked by the Constitutional Council, members of which are appointed by the President of the Republic, the President of the National Assembly, and the President of the Senate. Former presidents of the Republic can also be members of the council if they want to (Valéry Giscard-d’Estaing et Jacques Chirac were the only former Presidents that participated into the council’s work)


title: Politics of France

text: The independent judiciary is based upon civil law system which evolved from the Napoleonic Codes. It is divided into the judicial branch (dealing with civil law and criminal law) and the administrative branch (dealing with appeals against executive decisions), each with their own independent supreme court of appeal: the Court of Cassation for the judicial courts and the "Conseil d'Etat" for the administrative courts. The French government includes various bodies that check abuses of power and independent agencies.


title: Politics of France

text: While France is a unitary state, its administrative subdivisions—regions, departments and communes—have various legal functions, and the national government is prohibited from intruding into their normal operations. France was a founding member of the European Coal and Steel Community, later the European Union. As such, France has transferred part of its sovereignty to European institutions, as provided by its constitution. The French government therefore has to abide by European treaties, directives and regulations. The Economist Intelligence Unit has described France as a "flawed democracy" in 2020.


title: Politics of France

text: A popular referendum approved the constitution of the French Fifth Republic in 1958, greatly strengthening the authority of the presidency and the executive with respect to Parliament.


title: Politics of France

text: The constitution does not contain a bill of rights in itself, but its preamble mentions that France should follow the principles of the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen", as well as those of the preamble to the constitution of the Fourth Republic. This has been judged to imply that the principles laid forth in those texts have constitutional value, and that legislation infringing on those principles should be found unconstitutional if a recourse is filed before the Constitutional Council. Also, recent modifications of the Constitution have added a reference in the preamble to an Environment charter that has full constitutional value, and a right for citizens to contest the constitutionality of a statute before the Constitutional Council.


title: Politics of France

text: The foundational principles of the constitution include: the equality of all citizens before law, and the rejection of special class privileges such as those that existed prior to the French Revolution; presumption of innocence; freedom of speech; freedom of opinion including freedom of religion; the guarantee of property against arbitrary seizure; the accountability of government agents to the citizenry.


title: Politics of France

text: France has a semi-presidential system of government, with both a President and a Prime Minister. The Prime Minister is responsible to the French Parliament. A presidential candidate is required to obtain a nationwide majority of non-blank votes at either the first or second round of balloting, which implies that the President is somewhat supported by at least half of the voting population.


title: Politics of France

text: As a consequence, the President of France is the pre-eminent figure in French politics. He appoints the Prime Minister. Though the President may not "de jure" dismiss the Prime Minister, nevertheless, if the Prime Minister is from the same political side, they can, in practice, have them resign on demand. (De Gaulle is said to have initiated this practice "by requiring undated letters of resignation from his nominees to the premiership," though more recent Presidents have not necessarily used this method.) The President appoints the ministers, ministers-delegate and secretaries. When the President's political party or supporters control parliament, the President is the "dominant" player in executive action, choosing whomever he wishes for the government, and having it follow "his" political agenda (parliamentary disagreements do occur, though, even within the same party).


title: Politics of France

text: However, when the President's political opponents control parliament, the President's dominance can be severely limited, as they must choose a Prime Minister and government who reflect the majority in parliament, and who may implement the agenda of the parliamentary majority. When parties from opposite ends of the political spectrum control parliament and the presidency, the power-sharing arrangement is known as cohabitation. Before 2002, "cohabitation" occurred more commonly, because the term of the President was seven years and the term of the National Assembly was five years. With the term of the President shortened to five years, and with the presidential and parliamentary elections separated by only a few months, this is less likely to happen.


title: Politics of France

text: Emmanuel Macron became president on 14 May 2017, succeeding François Hollande. In the 2022 presidential election president Macron was re-elected after beating his far-right rival, Marine Le Pen, in the runoff. He was the first re-elected incumbent French president since 2002.


title: Politics of France

text: The Prime Minister leads the government, which comprises junior and senior ministers. It has at its disposal the civil service, government agencies, and the armed forces. The government is responsible to Parliament, and the National Assembly may pass a motion of censure, forcing the resignation of the government. This, in practice, forces the government to reflect the same political party or coalition which has the majority in the Assembly. Ministers have to answer questions from members of Parliament, both written and oral; this is known as the "questions au gouvernement" ("questions to the government"). In addition, ministers attend meetings of the houses of Parliament when laws pertaining to their areas of responsibility are being discussed.


title: Politics of France

text: Government ministers cannot pass legislation without parliamentary approval, though the Prime Minister may issue autonomous regulations or subordinated regulations ("décrets d'application") provided they do not infringe on the Parliament domain, as detailed in the constitution. Ministers, however, can propose legislation to Parliament; since the Assembly is usually politically allied to the ministers, such legislation is, in general, very likely to pass. However, this is not guaranteed, and, on occasion, the opinion of the majority parliamentarians may differ significantly from those of the executive, which often results in a large number of amendments.


title: Politics of France

text: The Prime Minister can engage the responsibility of his government on a law, under article 49-3 of the Constitution. The law is then considered adopted unless the National Assembly votes a motion of censure, in which case the law is refused and the government has to resign. , the use of this article was the "First Employment Contract" proposed by Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, a move that greatly backfired.


title: Politics of France

text: Traditionally, the government comprises members of three ranks. Ministers are the most senior members of the government; deputy ministers ("ministres délégués") assist ministers in particular areas of their portfolio; ministers of state ("secrétaires d'État") assist ministers in less important areas, and attend government meetings only occasionally. Before the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1958, some ministers of particular political importance were called "secretaries of state" ("ministres d'État"); the practice has continued under the Fifth Republic in a purely honorific fashion: ministers styled "Secretary of State" are of higher importance in the "gouvernement".


title: Politics of France

text: The number of ministries and the division of responsibilities and administrations between them varies from government to government. While the name and exact responsibility of each ministry may change, one generally finds at least:


title: Politics of France

text: The government has a leading role in shaping the agenda of the houses of Parliament. It may propose laws to Parliament, as well as amendments during parliamentary meetings. It may make use of some procedures to speed up parliamentary deliberations.


title: Politics of France

text: The government holds weekly meetings (usually on Wednesday mornings), chaired by the President, at the Élysée Palace.


title: Politics of France

text: Following the election of Emmanuel Macron as president, Édouard Philippe became French Prime Minister on 15 May 2017. The current French Prime Minister is Élisabeth Borne since 16 May 2022.


title: Politics of France

text: The French executive has a limited power to establish regulation or legislation. (See below for how such regulations or legislative items interact with statute law.)


title: Politics of France

text: Only the President and Prime Minister sign decrees ("décrets"), which are akin to US executive orders. Decrees can only be taken following certain procedures and with due respect to the constitution and statute law.


title: Politics of France

text: The individual ministers issue ministerial orders ("arrêtés") in their fields of competence, subordinate to statutes and decrees.


title: Politics of France

text: Contrary to a sometimes used polemical "cliché", that dates from the French Third Republic of 1870–1940, with its decrees-law ("décrets-lois"), neither the President nor the Prime Minister may rule by decree (outside of the narrow case of presidential emergency powers).


title: Politics of France

text: The executive cannot issue decrees in areas that the Constitution puts under the responsibility of legislation, issued by Parliament. Still, Parliament may, through a habilitation law, authorize the executive to issue ordinances ("ordonnances"), with legislative value, in precisely-defined areas. Habilitation laws specify the scope of the ordinance. After the ordinance is issued, the government has to propose a ratifying bill in order that the ordinance becomes a law. If Parliament votes "no" to ratification, the ordinance is cancelled. Most of the time, ratification is made implicitly or explicitly through a Parliament act that deals with the subject concerned, rather than by the ratification act itself.


title: Politics of France

text: The use of ordinances is normally reserved for urgent matters, or for technical, uncontroversial texts (such as the ordinances that converted all sums in French Francs to Euros in the various laws in force in France). There is also a practice of using ordinances to transpose European Directives into French law, to avoid late transposition of Directives, which happens often and is criticized by the EU Commission. Ordinances are also used to codify law into codes – to rearrange them for the sake of clarity without substantially modifying them. They are also sometimes used to push controversial legislation through, such as when Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin created new forms of work contracts in 2005. The opposition then criticizes the use of ordinances in such contexts as anti-democratic and demeaning to Parliament. Note however that since the National Assembly can dismiss the government through a motion of censure, the government necessarily relies on a majority in Parliament, and this majority would be likely to adopt the controversial law anyway.


title: Politics of France

text: The general rule is that government agencies and the civil service are at the disposal of the government. However, various agencies are independent agencies ("autorités administratives indépendantes") that have been statutorily excluded from the executive's authority, although they belong in the executive branch.


title: Politics of France

text: These independent agencies have some specialized regulatory power, some executive power, and some quasi-judicial power. They are also often consulted by the government or the French Parliament seeking advice before regulating by law. They can impose sanctions that are named "administrative sanctions" "sanctions administratives". However, their decisions can still be contested in a judicial court or in an administrative court.


title: Politics of France

text: Public media corporations should not be influenced in their news reporting by the executive in power, since they have the duty to supply the public with unbiased information. For instance, the Agence France-Presse (AFP) is an independent public corporation. Its resources must come solely from its commercial sales. The majority of the seats in its board are held by representatives of the French press.


title: Politics of France

text: The government also provides for watchdogs over its own activities; these independent administrative authorities are headed by a commission typically composed of senior lawyers or of members of the Parliament. Each of the two chambers of the Parliament often has its own commission, but sometimes they collaborate to create a single "Commission nationale mixte paritaire". For example:


title: Politics of France

text: In addition, the duties of public service limit the power that the executive has over the French Civil Service. For instance, appointments, except for the highest positions (the national directors of agencies and administrations), must be made solely on merit (typically determined in competitive exams) or on time in office. Certain civil servants have statuses that prohibit executive interference; for instance, judges and prosecutors may be named or moved only according to specific procedures. Public researchers and university professors enjoy academic freedom; by law, they enjoy complete freedom of speech within the ordinary constraints of academia.


title: Politics of France

text: The government also provides specialized agencies for regulating critical markets or limited resources, and markets set up by regulations. Although, as part of the "administration", they are subordinate to the ministers, they often act with a high degree of independence.


title: Politics of France

text: Each ministry has a central administration ("administration centrale"), generally divided into directorates. These directorates are usually subdivided into divisions or sub-directorates. Each directorate is headed by a director, named by the President in Council. The central administration largely stays the same, regardless of the political tendency of the executive in power.