The famous cathedral has a façade as unfinished and untidy as a peacock from behind, and it is usually deserted; but it is Rimini's best, still. Interesting to loiter here and ruminate upon its makers: chief of them the black Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, who built it, not only as a service for a God whom he too often forgot, but as a fitting resting-place when that orgy, his life, was over. His story is a dark one. He was born in 1417 and died in 1468. His imperious hawk-shaped head tells us that he could brook no opposition, and throughout his tempestuous career he did everything he wished, as Italian tyrants of the Middle Ages were peculiarly able to. Three wives at least he espoused and then murdered, but at last fell completely under the charm of the fair and gifted Isotta degli Atti, who had enough influence with him to force him to marry her and enough good fortune to survive him. Sigismondo as a bold bad man has almost no superior in the annals of wilfulness and turpitude, but alongside his abnormal cruelties and excesses was a devotion to art and philosophy which not only led him to invite Alberti here to design, and the sweet and simple Piero della Francesca to paint, and certain of the best sculptors to carve, his cathedral--but he entertained scholars and poets continually in his city of lawless passions, and himself brought hither from Greece the bones of the famous Neo-Platonist, Gemisthos Plethon, the father of the New Learning, and reinterred them in state in this Christian fane. Strange lurid times and strange anomalies in them! Sigismondo's tomb, with the elephant pertaining to his crest, and Isotto's tomb near it (with Isotto herself as an angel on the altar) were both constructed in their lifetime and must have been visited continually by their intended occupants to see what progress was being made. His own tomb bears a cynical couplet which, with his descriptive name, sufficiently describes the man for posterity. As for the most famous figures in Rimini, those two fated lovers of whom Dante first sang--Paolo and Francesca--one hears nothing of them in the city to-day, and sees only picture post-cards representing a modern meretricious painting of the hapless pair. It was an ancestor of Sigismondo (he himself left no lawful descendants), Giovanni the Lame, who was the husband of Francesca. And Francesca loved too well her husband's brother Paolo the beautiful, and Giovanni had both of them put to death in 1288, when Dante was a young man of twenty-three.