ABSTRACT
Rimini is not an attractive town. There are the sands and the Adriatic, flat hotels and villas stretching half a mile from the shore with hardly a stop. But these are cut off from the town by the dirty, jagged knife of the railway. You are then in a town of cobblestones, in no way picturesque; a countrytown that sprawls almost in the northern manner of industrial suburbs. What abruptness abounds is harsh and without colour. The port where the river Marecchia flows into the sea beside the bathing establishments, the Roman bridge over the Marecchia, the Roman arch on the Flaminian road, these are points of interest; but as centres of departure and as points of reference in the mind, they do not 'work5. The streets, of no great length, seem endless as the Commercial Road. For whither could they lead? Not back to any great distance in the past in spite of the superb Roman bridge and the Roman arch, in spite of the Rubicon which was one of the streams just north of the Marecchia and of Rimini. The Rubicon served as boundary between Roman Italy and Cisalpine Gaul. But Rimini has lost the keen air of a frontier town, and if you were expecting some link
