San Marino: Upon the Rock of the Oldest Republic

The steel serpent that rides the rails from Bologna Centrale to Rimini departs in its own unhurried way, as Italian trains sometimes do, and arrives on the Adriatic coast in just over an hour. Bologna recedes into its red-roofed world of arcades and ancient learning; the country opens out into flatter, more coastal terrain, the light changing as the sea approaches. Rimini itself holds little drama — it is a beach city, practical and seasonal — but it is the necessary door through which one must pass to reach the mountain republic beyond.

The traveller's instructions, received from prior reading, proved exact: exit the station, cross to the Burger King side of the road, and find the small tabaccheria tucked to its left. There, a Bonelli Bus ticket changes hands for six euros. The bus stop itself has migrated since older accounts were written — it now rests in front of the Napoleon Hotel, a short walk along the same street — and the traveller who arrives early enough to queue will be rewarded with a seat. The bus is not a luxury affair. It carries tourists and locals alike, its schedule sparse enough that the timing of one's Trenitalia arrival must be matched carefully against the posted timetable. But it climbs. And it climbs. And then, through the windows, the mountain appears.

Monte Titano rises from the Adriatic plain without preamble or apology. The bus takes the mountain road in switchbacks, and with each turn the view behind expands — the flat agricultural land, the distant thread of the coast, the blue suggestion of the sea. At 739 metres, the peak claims its republic. The bus deposits its passengers at Piazzale Calcigni, just outside the walls of the old city, and the traveller steps out into air that is cooler and clearer than Bologna's, into a place where the twenty-first century has been politely asked to wait outside.

San Marino's old town is small enough that it can be walked end to end in twenty minutes, and rich enough in history that those twenty minutes, if attended to properly, can take the better part of an afternoon. The cobblestone streets wind between medieval buildings in pale stone, past souvenir shops — which skew, with some enthusiasm, toward replica crossbows and antique-style weaponry, San Marino having a long tradition of archery — and up toward the ridge of Monte Titano where the three towers stand against whatever sky the day has offered.

The first tower, Guaita, is the oldest and the largest, and it is the one that appears in every photograph of the republic — pentagonal, battlemented, set directly upon the mountain rock without foundations as though it grew there. The word Guaita means "to guard," borrowed from an older Germanic tongue, and guarding is precisely what it has done since the eleventh century. The traveller who climbs it earns the view: the whole city below, the Apennine mountains to the west, the Adriatic plain stretching east toward the sea, and on a clear day the sea itself, a silver line at the world's edge. Two mortars, gifts of a nineteenth-century Italian king, stand in the courtyard. Former garrisons once imprisoned within these walls still carry the dim weight of that history.

The second tower, Cesta, houses the Sammarinese Museum of Ancient Arms — some two thousand pieces of medieval armour and weaponry gathered across four rooms, a collection that rewards those with patience for the particular poetry of a well-made gauntlet or the geometry of a crossbow's mechanism. From its walls, the view shifts: the second tower shows the plain that stretches toward the Adriatic, the mountains, the spine of the republic's own ridge. The third tower, Montale, stands apart and is visible but not open to visitors — it holds itself at a private distance, as ruins sometimes will.

Below the towers, the Basilica di San Marino stands in neoclassical composure, its eight Corinthian columns keeping a quiet vigil over Piazza Domus Plebis. Built in 1836 on the site of a seventh-century church, it houses relics of Saint Marinus himself — the stonemason from Croatia who fled Roman persecution, was given a mountain by a woman whose son he had healed, and founded, from that act of refuge, an institution that outlasted every Roman emperor, every medieval duchy, every modern fascism that came looking at its walls. The Palazzo Pubblico, seat of the republic's government since 1894, stands nearby in its battlemented dignity — a building that has managed to look both official and slightly theatrical since the day it was built, which is perhaps appropriate for a country that is itself a kind of ongoing theatre of improbability.

Lunch was taken in the old town, as it ought to be. San Marino sits in the Emilia-Romagna region, and the regional dishes follow the traveller up the mountain. A piadina — the soft flatbread of the Romagna coast, filled with squacquerone cheese and prosciutto and served warm from a griddle — is the correct meal for this altitude and this hour. Simple, specific, the kind of food that asks nothing of you except that you eat it without ceremony and feel, briefly, entirely correct about where you are.