The King of San Marino

06.11.2019 - 06.11.2019
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When I awoke in my room in San Marino’s Hotel Joli on Wednesday 6 November 2019, I got up, stretched my arms, walked across to the window and drew the heavy maroon curtains. My jaw dropped. Before me was a beautiful vista of crinkled lime-green hills, deep valleys covered in vineyards, limestone crags and terracotta-tiled houses tumbling over one another in terraced villages. I hadn’t seen any of this when I arrived in San Marino the evening before; the sun had set well before my train had arrived at Rimini twenty-two kilometres away. I smiled and knew instantly that today was going to be a special day.

With a spring in my step after a horrid day before, I emerged from the hotel and grabbed breakfast at a nearby café. My stay there was a little longer than anticipated because yet another rainstorm came barrelling through. The weather in San Marino can be vicious; the city is on top of the highest mountain for miles around seven hundred metres above sea level. There is nothing to stop the winds or the stormfronts coming from any direction.

After the rain eased the weather was relatively fine the rest of the day. I climbed a steep street into the old town and stopped at the City of San Marino’s main square, the Piazza della Libertà, a long quadrangle perched on the edge of a precipice with great views of the surrounding countryside. In the centre of the piazza is the Statue of Liberty. A nice enough sculpture, but I think New York need not lose any sleep.

At the north end of the square is a small narrow castle-like building, the Palazzo Publico, home to San Marino’s parliament. I walked in, checked in at the front desk, and then was pretty much given free rein to wander around. How many national parliaments will let you do this in these anxious days? I went into the chamber of the parliament which has the coolest name of any legislature of any country – the Grand and General Council. It was small and intimate with a fantastic mural of angels and knights and the founder of the Republic, Saint Marinus, looking over proceedings from above the chairs of the two speakers. There are two speakers who are also the two joint heads of state and government. They also have the coolest job title of any leaders of any nation – the Captains-Regent.

Next on my itinerary was the Basilica of San Marino. This church built in 1839 isn’t particularly historic by European standards, but it was pleasant nonetheless. Behind its neoclassical portico is a church with a long white colonnaded nave with a barrel-vaulted ceiling. Behind the altarpiece is an alabaster statue of Saint Marinus carrying a scroll inscribed upon which is a single word: “LIBERTAS”.

San Marino has an interesting history. Tradition holds that the state was founded by Saint Marinus in 301 AD. Saint Marinus was a stonemason who led a small Christian community in the coastal city of Rimini. In those pre-Constantine days, Christians were subject to great persecution by the Roman Empire. Having had enough of this oppression – I can imagine helmeted centurions with pointy pikes pricking poor Saint Marinus and his acolytes during midnight raids – he and his followers moved to the top of a nearby mountain, Mount Titano, where they started a hermetic monastic community far away from harassment.

San Marino has been jealous of its independence ever since. Countless internecine wars between mediaeval Italian city-states, revolutionary waves sweeping the Continent, the fanatics of the Risorgimento led by Garibaldi who were determined to unite the entire Italian peninsula by hook or by crook, Mussolini’s fascist nationalism, Hitler and World War II – San Marino has not only survived them all in one piece, but has thrived. It has one of the world’s highest standards of living with reliable and efficient public services. I find that it helps when you think of San Marino as a miniature version of Italy where things actually work.

After visiting the Basilica I caught the Funivia, an aerial cable car that links the old town of the City of San Marino on top of Mount Titano with the suburb Borgo Maggiore further down the mountain. The old town is a popular tourist destination for Italians in the summer but there is not much parking, so the Funivia cable car connects a car park downhill to the old town above. In autumn, San Marino was dead and I was one of the few people to enjoy the spectacular views from the Funivia’s glassy cable cars going up and down the hill.

I then went on a nice little hike. The most famous features of San Marino are the Three Towers of Mount Titano. These towers are everywhere – on the coat of arms, on the national flag, on licence plates, on government buildings. These mediaeval fortifications are stretched along the long limestone ridge of Mount Titano; the first tower is at the northern end of the mountain, the second tower is on the nation’s highest point in the middle of the ridge, and the much smaller third tower is at the south end.

The first tower is the largest and most impressive with multiple shells of extensive battlements surrounding the tower at the core. This tower was once used as a prison and there is some very artistic nineteenth-century graffiti in the cells.

The second tower isn’t as large as the first tower, but it is the highest point of the Most Serene Republic of San Marino. Of course, it was hard to tell which was the highest natural point considering that a mediaeval fort had been built on top of it. Still, I reached the highest possible point open to the public, a stone landing at the bottom of the main tower – the tower itself was inaccessible to visitors. To celebrate the eighth highest point of a country that I have climbed, I pointed my fingers in the air and shouted “Io sono il Re di San Marino!” I am the King of San Marino.

In one of the buildings at the second tower was a museum of weapons. This isn’t really my thing but it was vaguely interesting to see all the pikes, halberds, breastplates, swords, muskets, carbines and the like. Outside there were some more great views over the hills and valleys in every direction. Rimini with its trashy coastal resort hotels and large marina were clearly visible as was the deep blue Adriatic Sea beyond it.

A forest path took me to the third tower. The vast majority of visitors only visit the first and second towers; I had this beautiful trail to myself. The third tower is only a small affair, there are no walls, just a relatively stumpy square column that looked a bit like a village church belltower. It is also a private residence and so not open to the public. One marvellous thing about the Three Towers – each tower is topped with a metal feather, just like on San Marino’s coat of arms.

The hiking track continued south, down to a car park at the studios of SMRTV, San Marino’s public broadcaster – yes, a country of thirty-three thousand people has its own television station – and back to the fortified old town. I ambled up and down its narrow streets nearly as steep as staircases. I was astounded to see a multitude of shops selling guns. I’m not talking about mere pistols or hunting rifles, but serious stuff – machine guns and the like. There are also plenty of kitschy museums whose sole raison d’être is to separate gullible tourists from their hard-earned cash, like a museum of torture and a museum of curiosities. I grabbed lunch at a weird little place that was a grocery store, a café, a wine store and a souvenir shop all in one. I had a piadina, a specialty of the Emilia-Romagna region which surrounds San Marino; a piece of flatbread folded like a taco around a filling of prosciutto, mozzarella and rocket.

I visited the State Museum of San Marino, unexpectedly large for such a diminutive land. It wasn’t a bad museum and it gave a thorough overview of the country’s history, though the museum was a tad too heavy on artefacts retrieved from obscure long-gone monasteries – altarpieces and triptychs and the like, and more religious paintings of middling quality than I care to remember. I’m not complaining, I respect each country’s right to encourage the use of their national languages, but the fact that all interpretive text was only in Italian reduced my engagement with the exhibits.

My day in San Marino concluded with yet another magnificent meal at a fairly expensive restaurant, one of the few I could find that was open and didn’t require a reservation. Scalloped veal with potatoes, cauliflower and chestnut was the main course followed by a dessert of deconstructed torta della nonna, a variety of custard cake. I needed to dispose of a one hundred euro banknote. To my amazement, an ATM at Lake Bled had spat out a €100 note several days earlier. This made me nervous – large denominations are not easily accepted in Europe, most ATMs dispense no notes bigger than €20 and many shops have signs expressly prohibiting the use of anything bigger than €50. I needn’t have worried; the restaurant accepted the banknote without question and I got my change of about seventy euros back.

The dinner was a fitting end to one of the more enjoyable days of this trip. The streets of the City of San Marino were nearly empty, I seemed to be the only tourist at many of the sights I visited. This is a shame because people don’t know what they’re missing. San Marino is a perfectly preserved mediaeval hilltop fortress, a fairytale of castle walls and towers and forests and steep, narrow cobblestoned alleys, a terracotta jewel set amid an emerald sea of vineyards and valleys. The country deserves a lot more than just one desultory page in my Lonely Planet.

I will admit that the main reason why I came to San Marino was to tick another country off my list, but I left seriously impressed. Visiting this magical little republic was a holiday within a holiday, a welcome respite from the chaos and inefficiency that lurks just outside its mountainous borders.

View from my room at the Hotel Joli