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RIMINI is one of the least pretentious towns in Italy, the archetypal seaside resort, with a reputation for good if slightly sleazy fun that puts it on a par with Blackpool or Torremolinos. It's certainly brash enough to bear the comparison, and there's plenty of money in evidence; but Rimini is never downright tacky. Rather, it's a traditional family resort, to which some Italians return year after year, to stay in their customary pensione and be looked after by a hardworking padrona di casa as if they were relatives. Indeed the warmth of hoteliers in this part of Italy has undoubtedly added to the tourist industry's success. The resort is best avoided in August, unless you feel you can cope with teeming crowds. Out of season, it's a pleasant-enough town, but many hotels, restaurants, shops, etc, are closed and the atmosphere is almost eerily quiet.
There's another, less savoury side to the town: Rimini is known across Italy for its fast-living and chancy nightlife, and there's a thriving hetero- and transsexual prostitution scene alongside the town's more wholesome attractions. The road between the train station and the beach can be particularly full of kerb-crawlers, and, although it's rarely dangerous, women on their own - after dark at any rate - should be wary in this part of town.
Rimini was 95 percent destroyed in the last war; however, the town does have a much-ignored old centre that is worth at least a morning of your time. The extensive beach operation you see now had been built over the last forty years until the "Adriatic slime slick" (a mass of gloopy algae) hit business badly at the beginning of the 1980s. The clean-up operation seems to have been almost completely successful - and, despite occasional recurrences, a daunting number of holidaymakers troop once more through the city's airport. The beach, the crowds and the wild cruising are what you really come for: Rimini is still the country's best place to party
The Town
There are two parts to Rimini. The belt of land east of the rail line is taken up mostly by holiday accommodation, leading down to the main drag of souvenir shops, restaurants and video arcades that stretches 9km north to the suburbs of Viserba and Torre Pedrera and 7km south to Miramare. Out of season, hotel windows are boarded up and neon signs are wrapped in black plastic to protect against the gales, and Rimini's activity contracts around the Parco dell'Indipendenza and the old town, inland. This is the second, often unseen part of Rimini, a ten-minute walk west from the train station - stone buildings clustered around the twin squares of Piazza Tre Martiri and Piazza Cavour, bordered by the port-canal and town ramparts.
On the southern and northern edges of the old centre respectively, the Arco d'Augusto and Ponte Tiberio sit just inside the ramparts, built at the beginning of the first century AD and BC respectively and testifying to Rimini's importance as a Roman colony. The patched-up Arco was built at the point where Via Emilia joined Via Flaminia. Rimini's other Roman remains consist of the Anfiteatro , of which there are sparse foundations off Via Roma, just south of the train station.
The city passed into the hands of the papacy in the eighth century and was subject to a series of disputes that left it in the hands of the Guelph family of Malatesta. Just south of the Ponte Tiberio, Piazza Tre Martiri and Piazza Cavour are the two main squares. Piazza Cavour has a statue of Pope Paul V and the Gothic Palazzo del Podestà ; the square was rebuilt in the 1920s, and purists argue that it was ruined, although its fishtail battlements are still impressive enough. Buskers play here, and bikes and Vespas converge from all directions. Opposite, beyond the sixteenth-century fountain incorporating Roman reliefs, the Porticus Piscarias shades bookstalls worth a browse. Castel Sigismondo , in the adjoining Piazza Malatesta , designed and built in 1446 by Sigismondo Malatesta, holds a museum of ethnography, Museo delle Culture Extraeuropee "Dinz Rialto" (Mon-Fri 8.30am-1.30pm, Sat & Sun 3.30-6.30pm; L4000/?2.07), with a fine collection of Oceanic and pre-Columbian art. The Museo della Città at Via L. Tonini 1 (daily 9am-1.30pm & 3.30-6.30pm, closed Mon afternoon; L6000/?3.10) has a collection of works of art dating from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the highlight of which is Giovanni Bellini's pietà.
The Malatesta family provided the town's best-known monument, the Tempio Malatestiano just east of here on Via 4 Novembre (daily 7.30am-12.30pm & 3.30-7pm; free), a strange-looking building because it was left unfinished, but nevertheless one of the masterworks of the Italian Renaissance. Originally a Franciscan Gothic church, in 1450 Leon Battista Alberti transformed the building for Sigismondo Malatesta, a condittiero with an unparalleled reputation for evil, and it's an odd mixture of private chapel and personal monument. His long list of alleged crimes include rape, incest, plunder and looting, not to mention the extreme oppression of his subjects. The temple kept, rather disingenuously, its dedication to St Francis, but this didn't faze the pope at the time, Pius II, who condemned its graceful blend of pagan ornaments and classical hedonism, branding it "a temple of devil-worshippers".
Pius was angered enough to publicly consign Sigismondo to hell, burning an effigy of him in the streets of Rome. This had no effect on Sigismondo, who treated the church as a private memorial chapel to his great love, Isotta degli Atti. Their initials are linked in emblems all over the church, and the Malatesta armorial bearing - the elephant - appears almost as often. Trumpeting elephants, with their ears flying upwards, or elephants with their trunks entwined, decorate the screens between the side aisles and naves; chubby putti, nymphs and shepherds play, surrounded by bunches of black grapes, in a decidedly un-Christian celebration of humanism. There are a number of fine artworks, now restored and very spick and span: a Crucifix attributed to Giotto, friezes and reliefs by Agostino di Duccio and a fresco by Piero della Francesca of Sigismondo himself. All in all, it's an appropriate attraction for Rimini, its qualities of pleasurable extravagance almost an emblem for a town that thrives on excess.
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