I spent three days in San Marino, a landlocked microstate completely surrounded by Italy.
The people of San Marino are called the “Sammarinese.” Travelling in Afghanistan is hard, but writing about Afghanistan is easy.
If you are a white person in a place like Afghanistan, interesting things will happen to you.
You don’t even have to do anything.
Just stand on a street corner and strangers will stare at you and walk up to you and introduce themselves and shake your hand and offer you tea and food and show you around the city and you’ll find that it is harder to avoid getting into writing-worthy traveler adventures than to find them.
The European microstates of San Marino, Liechtenstein, Monaco, and Andorra have the opposite dynamic from a travel perspective.
They are beautiful, wealthy, safe, lovely countries squarely rooted in one of the most beautiful, wealthy, safe, and lovely regions in the world.
Hence, they are some of the most pleasantly boring/boringly pleasant countries in the world.
Their populations are content, their governments are highly functional, their economies hum along, and nothing of note has happened in any of them since World War II.
So in a sense, travelling through these European microstates is the ultimate challenge of this blog.
Not in the sense of paying that AK-wielding border guard $200 to let me out of Guinea was challenging, but in the sense that I needed to enhance my travel-writing focus to maximally mine pleasant dullness for anything interesting to write about.
I spent three days in San Marino, Liechtenstein, Monaco, and Andorra each, which, considering that they vary in geographic size from an American metro area to a large municipal park, and vary in population size from Bend, Oregon to Watertown, South Dakota, is a lot of time for each.
I truly wanted to suck the travel marrow from these countries.
I’m not sure that I entirely succeeded and I’m not sure I’ll write about all of them, but first up is San Marino.
(Note – all images in this post can be expanded by clicking on them.) Population (2026) – 33,500 (5th lowest in the world) Population Growth Rate (2025) – 0% Size – 23.6 square miles/61.2 square kilometers (a little bigger than Manhattan) GDP (nominal, 2025) – $2.25 billion (less than the estimated net worth of Mr.
Beast) GDP growth rate (2025) – 1.5% GDP per capita nominal (2025) – $65,543 (comparable to Austria or Kentucky) GDP per capita PPP (2023) – $78,000 (compare to about $59,000 for Italy, or $55-60K for the two adjacent Italian provinces) Inflation rate (2021-2024) – 1.24-5.93% (Euro) Biggest export – “Washing and Bottling Machines” Median age (2025) – 48.6 years Life expectancy (2025) – 86 years (ranked #2 in the world on some lists) Murder rate (2025) – 0 per 100,000 Ethnicity – I don’t think there are any official records, but presumably mostly Sammarinese and Italian Religion (2023) – 85-95% Catholic Olympic Medals – 3 (1 silver, 2 bronze, all from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics) Normally I don’t describe national geographic layouts in these posts, but I think it’s worth doing for the European Microstates to emphasize their tininess and respective geopolitical oddities.
San Marino is situated in a hilly/mountainous region in northern-central Italy, wedged between two Italian provinces (Rimini and Pesaro e Urbino).
The nearest significant population center is Rimini (~150,000 inhabitants), a somewhat rundown coastal beach city with typically beautiful Italian old towns and cathedrals.
It took two trains over five hours for me to get from Rome to Rimini, from which almost everyone enters San Marino.
The Rimini-San Marino bus runs every hour from morning to night, is surprisingly convenient, and takes about 45 minutes to drop off passengers in the heart of San Marino.
Like every other European Microstate (except Andorra), there are no border checkpoints around San Marino.
While waiting for the bus at 10 AM on a Wednesday, two ambiguously accented European men approached me, one of whom was shirtless.
I soon learned that they were Bulgarian BMW salesmen on holiday in Italy, and they decided to take a boozy day trip to San Marino.
I never learned why the one guy was shirtless, including throughout the entire bus ride, but I guess Bulgarians are going to Bulgarian.
The capital of the nation of San Marino is the City of San Marino, which is situated in the center of the country.
The City of San Marino is one of nine castelli (Italian for “castle”), their term for municipalities, or perhaps more accurately in this case, tiny provinces.
Castello populations range from 11,200 to 1,000, and the capital is actually only the third-largest at a little over 4,000 inhabitants, largely due to the City of San Marino being given almost entirely over to tourist and government functions (in that order).
Having done almost no research on San Marino before arriving, my first surprise was how rural the country feels.
I guess I implicitly assumed that microstates tend to be compact and urban, like Vatican City or Monaco, but most of San Marino feels vast and empty.
It’s a land of fairly steep rolling hills with nearly all stores and homes built along primary avenues with few side roads.
Serravalle, the largest castello (holding about one-third of the population), is the relative exception and is the most urban part of the country, at least in a modern sense.
It is based on the northern border closest to Rimini, so the San Marino Mall and accompanying wholesalers claim most of the commercial traffic coming from Italy.
Many Sammarinese live in Serravalle to make daily commutes for work in Rimini: Serravalle also has a bunch of middle-class European residential neighborhoods: Once the bus from Rimini gets through Serravalle, tourists find themselves in remote European hill country… Peppered with small Sammarinese towns… Aside from the reasonably good infrastructure, the rest of the country doesn’t feel wealthy by European standards, but there is a quiet pleasantness to it.
And in most of this pleasant, remote European hill country, you can see the City of San Marino in all of its glory built atop Monte Titano (the country’s highest peak), particularly the Three Towers, San Marino’s most famous sites: But what is San Marino? Why is San Marino? How did a nation that is smaller than some data centers and can barely fill a large Chinese apartment block and is surrounded by a multi-time imperial power manage to survive as an independent sovereign state for arguably well over a millennium? The Little Republic That Could San Marino claims to be the world’s oldest continuously operating sovereign republic.
Its competition includes the Venetian Republic, which lasted 1,100 years from 697 AD to Napoleon’s conquest in 1797.
Of other currently independent republics, Switzerland, or at least the Swiss Canton system, can arguably date back to the 1200s, but it was conquered and rearranged a few times, so it wasn’t continuous.
If you want to really stretch definitions and claims, Iceland could argue that its current republican government began in 930 with the Althing (the world’s first parliament) with a few interruptions and long periods of sovereignty loss along the way.
But as far as I can tell, San Marino really is probably the longest-running independent republic in history, though even the most ardent Sammarinese fascist would admit that the nation’s official founding date of 301 is highly suspect.
The founding myth is that a Christian stonecutter named Marinus fled persecution in modern day Croatia to settle in remote central Italy where he could live a simple life of Christian tranquility.
At the time, Christianity was a growing minority (maybe 10%) in the Roman Empire and faced periodic waves of persecution; official state tolerance of Christianity wouldn’t be enacted for another decade, and Christianity wouldn’t become the state religion until about 380.
Meanwhile, Marinus’ home and church in central Italy became a small Christian community, which was later named “Saint Marinus” after its canonized founder, which was later Italianized into “San Marino.” There is very little evidence of any of this happening.
The story of Marinus is based on a Christian manuscript written at least 600 years later, and there is no evidence on the Church’s side of a canonization of any Marinus (though that isn’t too unusual for the time).
The first good evidence of San Marino’s existence is the “Placito Feretrano,” an 885 AD legal ruling from the Church that affirmed the separation of the monastery of San Marino from the lands of the Bishop of Rimini.
The document implied that the monastery had existed for some time, but San Marino was probably a part of the Kingdom of Italy, a realm ruled by a relative of Charlemagne.
The earliest documented evidence of San Marino operating as an independent sovereign city state dates back to a notary deed from a land sale in 1243 that refers to two Consuls governing San Marino, which is the structure the country retains to this day (though the consuls are now called Captain Regents).
This is fascinating to me.
As far as modern scholars are concerned, there was some sort of local political entity in San Marino created at some point in probably a 900-year time span (300-1243), but nobody knows when or how or why or who was involved.
Even in the heart of Europe, only about 140 miles from Rome, it is possible for the history of an independent political entity to be lost to the sands of time.
Of course, I know that the Dark Ages lost a lot of records and kept even fewer, but still, it sort of blows my mind that there is a contemporary European country and nobody knows how it started.
Records get much better from the 14th century onward.
At that time, San Marino consisted of whatever community/monastery was on Mount Titano and a few surrounding towns.
In the mid-15th century, San Marino joined a war on the side of Pope Pius II against the Lordship of Rimini and the Pope won; in 1463, for whatever contributions San Marino made, it was rewarded with enough Rimini land to double its size by annexing the Castelli of Fiorentino, Montegiardino, Serravalle, and Faetano, bringing the country to its maximum extent and the borders that it maintains as of 2026.
This era, around the 1300s and 1400s, was the height of political decentralization in Europe, at least post-Roman Empire, particularly in modern Germany and Italy.
It’s actually pretty hard to recreate maps of the time, but Europe looked something like this: But from that point onward, Europe went into a period of consolidation as bigger states ate or merged with smaller ones, including the prominent Italian city states like Venice, Florence, and Genoa, and the Papal States itself, all of which entered into the sort of hyper-competitive international diplomatic/warfare competition that produced Niccolo Machiavelli.
The most fascinating part of San Marino’s history is that they managed to get through all the fighting and merging in one piece, let alone as an independent sovereign state.
So how did San Marino do it? San Marino repeatedly made the right diplomatic deals, was in a unique geopolitical environment that catered to its strengths, was highly adaptable, and got very lucky.
IMO, if there was a secret sauce in the equation, it was paradoxically that San Marino was too meek to be conquered.
It was a small, rural, isolated group of villages without any significant economic prospects, and it was intimately tied with its Christian monastery and Christian history.
Conquest often wasn’t worth it for larger regional powers due to the reputational repercussions – marching an invading army into poor, little, pious, hyper-Christian San Marino in the heart of Italy was a bad look for stronger states.
Later on, San Marino adapted diplomatically by emphasizing non-Christian elements of its culture and history, like its republicanism or conservatism, to similarly get on the right side of potential invaders.
I am going to try to go through the history of attempted and realized invasions/annexations of San Marino to give a sense of how this tiny state kept wiggling out of annexation.
By my count, there are 13 such instances: (Note – Keep in mind that when this sequence starts in 1300 AD, the population of San Marino was probably about 1,500.) First, around 1300, the Bishop of Montefeltro tried to enforce his longstanding territorial claim on San Marino.
The conflict escalated to the point of San Marino raising an army, but the two sides settled on a diplomatic deal in which San Marino would continue to recognize itself as part of Montefeltro’s ecclesiastical diocese (sort of like a Catholic Church province) but would otherwise operate as a politically independent entity.
However, the Bishopric retained its claim on San Marino, and in 1320, the Bishop tried to transfer his claim on San Marino to the Malatesta noble family in Rimini, but the deal never went through, probably because the Pope (or his underlings) blocked it.
Second, in the 1350s, the Papal States expanded farther into northern Italy.
At that point, San Marino was in an alliance with the Count of Montefeltro against the Papal States.
After the Count lost one of their wars, he signed a peace treaty in which Papal troops were given license to put a garrison in San Marino.
If that had happened and the Papal States had kept expanding, San Marino likely would have been absorbed into the Papal domain.
However, for reasons that are seemingly lost to history, this part of the deal was never enforced and no Papal troops were ever stationed in San Marino.
Third, in 1375, allegedly, Sammarinese citizen Giacomo Pelizzaro conspired to launch some sort of insurrection in San Marino and then hand control of the state to the Bishop of Montefeltro, but Pelizzaro was exposed, arrested, and then executed after a confession.
Fourth, around 1443, San Marino was directly attacked by military forces for the first time in its recorded history.
There was a long struggle for regional dominance between the Rimini-based Malatesta family and the Urbino-based Montefeltro family, and San Marino siding with the latter.
In or before 1443, the head of the Montefeltro family died, and in the midst of the succession, the Malatestas organized a secret night attack to seize San Marino.
There isn’t much of a historical account of the battle, but the Montefeltros warned San Marino at the last moment, and the republic fended off the assault.
Fifth, in 1449, the Malatestas tried to bribe key Sammarinese citizens to launch an internal revolt or coup, but the plot was discovered and fell apart.
Sixth, in 1502, San Marino was militarily occupied for the first time in its recorded history and came closer than ever to being annexed by Cesare Borgia, who was the son of a Pope, the Duke of Romagna, and later one of the later key figures in Machiavelli’s The Prince.
In the early 1500s, he went on a remarkably successful military and diplomatic conquest spree in Central Italy.
San Marino was aligned with Borgia’s enemies and knew it was in its war path, so it made a bunch of diplomatic overtures and sent gifts (of food and wine), but San Marino couldn’t wriggle its way out of danger; in 1502, Borgia’s troops conquered and occupied San Marino.
A few months later, the Sammarinese successfully revolted and reasserted independence, asked Venice for help against a Borgia counterattack, Venice refused, and the Borgias reconquered San Marino.
That is until mid-1503 when the Borgia regime suddenly fell apart due to Italian political back-stabbing, and the Borgia troops slinked away and permitted San Marino to become an independent country once again.
Seventh, the near-conquest in 1543 was a strange one.
A mercenary army of 500 men attempted a surprise assault on San Marino in the middle of the night, just as the Malatestas had tried exactly 100 years ago.
However, there was an allegedly divinely sent fog over the land that night, so the mercenaries were scattered and couldn’t get to San Marino fast enough.
When day broke, the mercenaries were discovered, and San Marino called for assistance from the nearby Duke of Urbino who proceeded to run the mercenaries off.
It is lost to history who actually hired the mercenaries or why.
(In the 1460s, the Malatestas were finally defeated by an alliance of the Pope and the Montefeltros, and that’s when San Marino doubled its size to its current borders.) Eighth, in 1549, there is a sparse historical record of the nearby Lord of Verucchio plotting an invasion of San Marino, but when the plan was discovered, San Marino once again asked the Duke of Urbino (of the Montefeltro family) for assistance, and the Duke’s mere pledge of support put an end to the plot.
Ninth, in 1556, pretty much the same thing happened again, but this time the Duke of Urbino scared off the Pope.
Why was Urbino so good to San Marino? Because the latter was small, unambitious, loyal, acted as a buffer state against enemies, and by that point, the alliance had been in place for centuries, dating back to when the Montefeltro family didn’t hold Dukedoms.
Tenth, in 1631, San Marino faced arguably the greatest long-term threat to its independence to date when the Dukedom of Urbino was absorbed into the Papal States, which left San Marino as an enclave within the Papal States.
With no larger protector, the Papacy certainly had the military power and authority to absorb tiny San Marino.
Instead, the Sammarinese went on a diplomatic blitz and got the Pope to sign an update of a 1603 treaty affirming San Marino’s independence.
As with the Dukedom of Urbino, San Marino was small, loyal, unambitious, and also Catholic enough for it to not be worth the Papal States making a fuss about its independence.
Eleventh, 1797 was a fun one.
From March 1796 to October 1797, Napoleon ran around Italy crushing Austrian/Italian/Papal armies and turning himself into a legend.
And when he wasn’t fighting battles, writing condescending letters to the Pope, or stealing art, he was redrawing the map of Italy pretty much entirely by his unilateral whims.
Many longstanding city states and dukedoms were demolished or merged into larger polities formed by fiat by Napoleon, including the Republic of Venice, which was brought to the end after 1,100 years of existence when Napoleon abolished its government and soon handed it over to Austria as part of a larger peace deal.
It seemed like tiny San Marino had finally encountered an Italian who could could easily conquer the republic and there was no bigger, stronger state left to defend it.
In 1797, when Napoleon sent a diplomat to San Marino, the republic braced for the worst.
But unbeknownst to its Captain Regents, San Marino was in a far better diplomatic position than it knew.
It had vibes on its side.
Basically, as best as I can tell from the historical record, Napoleon and most other well-read revolutionaries of the time knew of San Marino as a historical curio but almost nothing about its specifics.
They didn’t know how its government worked (beyond being a republic) or who ruled it, and they almost certainly never met anyone from San Marino and probably not anyone who had been to San Marino, but nevertheless, they liked San Marino because it was a weird little descendent of the Roman Republic that had survived for centuries despite being nestled between reactionary Popes, kings, and dukes.
From the revolutionary standpoint, San Marino had good vibes.
Napoleon’s Life in Camp and Cabinet was published in 1847 and is not exactly the most reliable account of the French Emperor, but its part on San Marino is probably directionally accurate: “Some hundred and thirty odd miles north of the city of Rome… stands a strong town, built upon a mountain, called San Marino, the capital of a small republic bearing the same name, the territories of which comprise little more than a few barren rocks: in this rude district, during the space of thirteen hundred years, freedom has flourished in all its primitive simplicity.
Buonaparte, when he entered the Romagna, caught a glimpse in the distance of this abode of liberty, upon which, at that moment, the sun shed some of its brightest rays; its elevation, thus illumined, afforded a beautiful perspective that appeared to make a deep impression upon the Corsican, when he understood, by inquiring, the character of the scene with which he was so much pleased.
It is rather a singular circumstance, that although he would go to Rome to conclude his treaty with the ministers of the Vatican… he was extremely anxious to visit the rugged eminence of San Marino: to show his respect for the independent mountaineers, he wrote to its government, both through his general, Berthier, and by his own hand, in which he says,— “Citizen Monge [the diplomat Napoleon sent to San Marino] has described to me, citizens, the interesting picture which your little republic presents, and I have given orders that the citizens of San Marino may be exempt from contributions, and respected in whatever part of the French republic they may happen to be.
I shall give orders to General Sahuguet, who has his headquarters at Rimini, to transmit to you four pieces of field-cannon, which I present to you in the name of the Republic.
He will likewise place at your disposal a thousand quintals of corn, which will serve for the supply of your people until the harvest.
I beg you to believe, citizens, that under every circumstance I shall be anxious to give to the people of San Marino proofs of my esteem and distinguished consideration.” So not only did Napoleon not destroy San Marino or merge it into some puppet Italian state, but Napoleon declared his friendship with the republic and gave it a bunch of food and cannons and praise.
And better yet, a few months later, Napoleon offered land.
Or at least Napoleon’s envoy was authorized to discuss San Marino’s potential annexation of eastern land to connect the republic to the Adriatic Sea.
At the time, that territory was longstanding Papal State land and quite valuable.
But San Marino wisely declined the lebensraum.
Its leadership had become explicitly devoted to the doctrine of keeping San Marino small and weak, and by extension, out of the firing line of more territorially ambitious neighboring Italian states.
Plus, nobody knew how long these Napoleonic Italian borders (which Napoleon had no legal authority to create) would last, so it was probably best for San Marino to not piss off its likely future-resurgent neighbors.
Twelfth, in 1815, after Napoleon was defeated the first time but before he was conclusively defeated the second time, the great European powers got together at the Congress of Vienna to reestablish a balance of powers on the continent.
Once again, San Marino was completely at the mercy of foreigners, and also once again, it was completely surrounded territorially by the Papal States, which was in a resurgent position and probably could have bargained for control over the republic.
San Marino sent a diplomat to the Congress to argue for the republic’s existence, and while he understandably didn’t do much active negotiating and power-jockeying among the big boys, he more or less acted as a lobbyist for Sammarinese interests.
The result – San Marino was not mentioned in any treaties or pronouncements of the Congress of Vienna, and in this case, no news was good news.
The Sammarinese diplomat was apparently able to sell the big powers, particularly the influential Austrians who dominated northern Italy, that though San Marino was a republic, it was an ancient one, and therefore a based and trad defender of Evropean order.
As evidence, the diplomat pointed out that San Marino had turned down Napoleon’s offer to let the republic annex more land, a decision that the diplomat himself had strongly recommended 18 years ago.
And so San Marino chugged along as a little independent republic in the new Concert of Europe.
But San Marino’s greatest threat to its independence was soon to come.
The tiny republic survived the warring Italian families, survived the expansionist Popes, survived Napoleon, and survived the Concert of Europe, but how did an independent Italian state survive the Unification of Italy? Thirteenth, and finally… The Italian unification movement got going in earnest during Napoleon’s border redrawings, and grew considerably during the 19th century.
After 1815, Italy was divided into numerous independent monarchies, while northern Italy was dominated by Austria and southern Italy was under the control of the French Bourbon dynasty via the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
Some of the independent Italian states were onboard with pan-Italian unification and plotted to unify while revolutionaries launched revolts in the more conservative states and the Austrian territories.
The Sammarinese people and government were broadly sympathetic to the Italian unifiers and sometimes gave refuge to fleeing revolutionaries.
In 1848, there was a wave of liberal revolutions across Europe, including in the Papal States.
The Pope instituted some liberal reforms, but they weren’t enough to placate the mob, so in November, the Pope fled Rome for protection in the Two Sicilies.
In his absence, liberal Romans pushed out the Papal government and formed a new state awesomely called the Roman Republic.
At the military (though not political) head of the revolution was Giuseppe Garibaldi, one of the two main figures of the Italian Unification movement, and the closest thing to a dashing George Washington analogue Italy would get.
Less than five months later, French troops sent by Napoleon III marched on Rome and destroyed the Roman Republic.
Garibaldi fled Rome with 5,000 volunteer soldiers for Venice, which was actively fighting Austria.
But Austrian forces intercepted and pursued Garibaldi’s army, and after about a month, his forces were whittled down to 1,500-2,000.
Feeling the walls closing in, Garibaldi decided to try to hide out with his men in the furtive Republic of San Marino.
Though sympathetic, San Marino was understandably reluctant to let Italy’s most wanted man into its domain with Austrian armies in pursuit.
At first, San Marino tried to give Garibaldi’s army some food and send it on its way, but Garibaldi made the case that without being granted asylum, he and his men would all be killed, or imprisoned and then killed.
San Marino finally gave Garibaldi and his men access to the republic on the grounds that they effectively disband as an army and hand over all of their weapons, and then allow San Marino’s government to negotiate with Austria for their protection on essentially humanitarian grounds.
Garibaldi accepted the terms.
For its part, Austria was surprisingly lenient with San Marino’s blatant diplomatic transgression.
It only asked that the republic turn over Garibaldi and his top lieutenants so they could be exiled overseas, and for San Marino to surrender all the Italian weapons it had collected, and then the other 1,500-2,000 Italian rebels could return home unharmed.
When Garibaldi heard these terms, he assumed San Marino would accept them, so he snuck out of the republic with a small group of followers, tried to make his way north to Venice again, but ran into more Austrian forces, and ended up roaming around Italy as a fugitive.
Meanwhile, an understandably pissed off Austrian army crossed the Sammarinese border and threatened to occupy the country for collusion with the rebels, but the San Marino government managed to calm things down, hand over the guns, and reaffirm the original terms to let the rest of the rebels return home.
This is, as far as I can tell, the factual recollection of key events.
Where history becomes far murkier is what Garibaldi did or who he talked to during his brief time in San Marino, which is estimated at something like 12 hours.
Allegedly, Garibaldi was so thankful to San Marino for its protection, so enamored of its people, and fell so utterly in love with the republic during his day trip, that he may have single-handedly saved San Marino’s existence.
In 1861, the Kingdom of Italy was formed.
Garibaldi’s official role was only as an elected Deputy (akin to a Member of Parliament), but he was also the heroic, dashing, out-front leader of the now successful Italian revolution, which had just absorbed the states of Tuscany, Parma, Modena, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and most of the Papal States.
San Marino congratulated Garibaldi by making him an honorary Sammarinese citizen.
The historical records are shaky here, but there are some accounts that King Victor Emmanuel II and possibly some contingent of Italian revolutionaries wanted Italy to absorb....
