The city, I may say at once, is not the city of my dreams. I do not say it is disappointingly not so, for everything about it is so foreign and so interesting and (with the exception of the _plage_, the railway, and the trams) so mediæval--such a feat of survival--that it is satisfying even to one who had expected too much. The town itself is small and half derelict, and a long way (in hot weather) from the sea. On the shore, for a mile and more, is a new settlement of villas and bathing-boxes, a casino and the great white _à la mode_ hotel. This mile, inhabited wholly by strangers, comes to life in June and dies again in September, and has no dealings with the old town and the Golden Eagle and Three Kings whatever. Nor has the old town any dealings with the shore, for no one living at Rimini ever bathes. The only way in which old Rimini recognizes the sea is to circulate round the bandstand on Sundays and musical nights, otherwise it prefers to crumble in the sun, and recks nothing of salt water. Rimini's streets are narrow and paved with stones chosen carefully for their unsuitability for such a purpose. Its houses are high and squalid, but most charmingly sheltered with green. Its palaces are now rookeries. The main street is entered from the plain through a massive gateway--the Porta Romana--and passing through the town widens first into an arcaded oval, with a monument in it celebrating Cæsar's crossing of the neighbouring Rubicon in 49 B.C., then narrows again; then becomes the side of the principal square, the Piazza Cavour, where the theatre, the post office, the Municipio, the café, and the one suit of evening clothes are; then narrows again to pass the Golden Eagle and Three Kings; and after a further narrow period leaves the town by way of a stone bridge with five arches over the Marecchia, which was begun before Christ by Augustus and finished by Tiberius in A.D. 20; and so once more we enter the plain again. There are a few by-streets and the castle of the Malatestas and an amphitheatre, within the walls; and that is all. And everything has the disintegrating baked appearance of a city with a past.