Back to the coast and one comes to Rimini, the southern terminus of the Via Æmilia. Rimini’s Arco d’Augusto was erected as a memorial to the great Augustus in 27 B. C. The Ponte d’Augusto, too, is a monument of the times, which date back nearly nineteen centuries. It was begun in the last year of the life of Augustus.
The Palazzo del Comune contains the municipal picture-gallery, and before it stands a bronze statue of Pope Paul V, but the greatest interest lies in the contemplation of the now ruined and dilapidated Castel Malatesta. Its walls are grim and sturdy still, but it is nothing but a hollow mockery of a castle to-day, as it has been relegated to use as a prison and stripped of all its luxurious belongings of the days of the Malatesta. The family arms in cut stone still appear above the portal.
The chief figure of Rimini’s old time portrait gallery was the famous Lord of Rimini, Sigismondo Malatesta, a man of exquisite taste, a patron of the arts, a sincere lover of beauty.
From Rimini to Ravenna, still within sight of the Adriatic’s waves, is some fifty kilometres by road or rail, through a low, marshy, unwholesome-looking region, half aquatic, half terrestrial.
La Pineta, or the Pine Forest, the same whose praises were sung by Dante, Boccaccio, Dryden and Byron, and which supplied the timber for the Venetian ships of the Republic’s heyday is in full view from Ravenna’s walls.
Boccaccio made the Pineta the scene of his singular tale, “Nostagio degli Onesti”; the incidents of which, ending in the amorous conversion of the ladies of Ravenna, have been made familiar to the English reader by Dryden’s adoption of them in his “Theodore and Honoria.”
“Where the last Cæsarean fortress stood,
Evergreen forest! which Boccaccio’s lore
And Dryden’s lay made haunted ground.”
Ravenna sits grim and proud in the very midst of wide, flat, marshy plains across which straight arrow-like roads roll out seemingly interminable kilometres to the joy of the automobilist and the despair of the traveller with a hired hack. The region between Ravenna and the sea is literally half land, half water, marshes partitioned off by canals and pools stretching away in every direction. It is lone and strange, but it is not sad and above all is most impressive. Turn out of any of Ravenna’s great gates and the aspect is invariably the same. Great ox-carts, peasants in the fields and, far away, the brown sails of the Adriatic fishing boats are the only punctuating notes of a landscape which is anything but gay and lively. It is as Holland under a mediæval sun, for mostly the sun shines brilliantly here, which it does not in the Low Countries. Ravenna was the ancient capital of the Occidental Roman Empire, but to-day, in its marshy site, the city is in anything but the proud estate it once occupied. The aspect of the whole city is as weird and strange as that of its site. It is of far too great an area for the few thousand pallid mortals who live there. It has ever been a theatre of crime, disaster and disappointment, but its very walls and gateways echo a mysterious and penetrating charm. It possesses, even to-day, though more or less in fragments it is true, many structures dating from the fifth to the eighth centuries, though of its old Palace of the Cæsars but a few crumbled stones remain. Ravenna is the home of the classic typical Christian architecture which went out broadcast through Europe in the middle ages. The Palace of Theodoric hardly exists as a ruin, but some poor ugly stone piers are commonly granted the dignity of once having belonged to it, as well as an ancient wall of brick.
Theodoric’s tomb is in La Rotonda, a kilometre or more from Ravenna in the midst of a vineyard. The earliest portrait in Ravenna’s great gallery of notables is that of Theodoric, an art-loving ruler, an enlightened administrator, with simple, devout ideas, and a habit of nightly vigils. Ravenna was to him a world, a rich golden world, polished yet primitive.
Aside from its magnificent churches, Ravenna’s monuments are not many or great.