s of the little town depend on
them in a great measure. But visitors from the north will fly from
these, to marvel at the bridge which Augustus built and Tiberius
completed, and which still spans the Marecchia with five gigantic
arches of white Istrian limestone, as solidly as if it had not borne
the tramplings of at least three conquests. The triumphal arch, too,
erected in honour of Augustus, is a notable monument of Roman
architecture. Broad, ponderous, substantial, tufted here and there
with flowering weeds, and surmounted with mediaeval machicolations,
proving it to have sometimes stood for city gate or fortress, it
contrasts most favourably with the slight and somewhat gimcrack arch
of Trajan in the sister city of Ancona. Yet these remains of the
imperial pontifices, mighty and interesting as they are, sink into
comparative insignificance beside the one great wonder of Rimini, the
cathedral remodelled for Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta by Leo Battista
Alberti in 1450. This strange church, one of the earliest extant
buildings in which the Neopaganism of the Renaissance showed itself in
full force, brings together before our memory two men who might be
chosen as typical in their contrasted characters of the transitional
age which gave them birth.

No one with any tincture of literary knowledge is ignorant of the fame
at least of the great Malatesta family--the house of the Wrongheads,
as they were rightly called by some prevision of their future part in
Lombard history. The readers of the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth
cantos of the 'Inferno' have all heard of

E il mastin vecchio e il nuovo da Verucchio
Che fecer di Montagna il mal governo,

while the story of Francesca da Polenta, who was wedded to the
hunchback Giovanni Malatesta and murdered by him with her lover Paolo,
is known not merely to students of Dante, but to readers of Byron and
Leigh Hunt, to admirers of Flaxman, Ary Scheffer, Dore--to all, in
fact, who have of art and letters any love.

The history of these Malatesti, from their first establishment under
Otho III. as lieutenants for the Empire in the Marches of Ancona, down
to their final subjugation by the Papacy in the age of the
Renaissance, is made up of all the vicissitudes which could befall a
mediaeval Italian despotism. Acquiring an unlawful right over the
towns of Rimini, Cesena, Sogliano, Ghiacciuolo, they ruled their petty
principalities like tyrants by the help of the Guelf