His creativity and patient manual skills had transformed him into a sort of Gulliver, who moved around his Lilliput made up of famous churches, villages and monuments which he reconstructed in miniature, using thousands and thousands of bricks. That was the great passion of Rino Serra, a well-known character in Borello. He died two days ago, at the end of a degenerative disease that progressed very quickly. He leaves behind his children Alberto and Caterina, after the recent death of his wife Franca, whom he assisted for a long time, due to serious and prolonged health problems that had taken away her autonomy. Precisely after that mourning, Serra’s health conditions also deteriorated inexorably.
The funeral will be celebrated today at 3pm, in the church of his Borello, where he always lived, apart from his childhood in the Milanese area. Cremation will follow.
Born in 1945, Serra gained recognition in his working life as an official of the Cassa di Risparmio di Cesena. But the activity he loved most was the creation of scale models of buildings that fascinated him. Three of these, the reproductions of the churches of Borello and San Vittore and the castle of Teodorano, were donated, so that they could be admired by visitors to the respective places which they depicted in miniaturized dimensions. Others, such as the one dedicated to the Borello primary school, would be nice if they were valorised in the same way. For others still, such as the Parthenon in Athens or Trajan’s column, it is impossible to think of solutions of that type, but how to preserve them and allow everyone to see them, perhaps gathering them in a single space, is a need that children and friends of the deceased they will not neglect.
Another passion of Rino Serra, which tells a lot about him and how he liked to surround himself with small worlds, which ranged from his own roots to distant lands, was the collection of sands from countries all over the world. He put them inside the bottles that are usually used for spices, meticulously arranged on a wall of his house, after having “catalogued” labels that indicated the origin of each of those “pinch” of the planet. Some had picked him up personally during trips he had taken, but most were the result of deliveries that friends and acquaintances who returned from holidays abroad had given him over the years, knowing about that particular hobby of his.
A final interest of Rino Serra was that of the history of the mines of Formignano: he was among the founding members of the Society for Studies and Research of Mining Romagna, of which he was also bursar.
