“You speak Italian.”

“We’re not Italian.”

“Your country’s the size of a Wal-Mart and you’re completely surrounded on all sides by Italy.”

“We’re not Italian.”

“You just served me Italian food.”

“We’re not Italian.”

San Marino is a very small country that definitely is not Italy, I guess. Getting there is a pain in the ass.

“Not here, go to information desk,” the Italian bus station ticket guy said, pointing at something unseen off in the distance. I walked over there and there were no desks, information or otherwise. Hmmm.

I walked back inside the train station and along a corridor of shops until I came across a little convenience store that had not one but two big signs in the window that said SAN MARINO BUS TICKETS HERE. Well okay then!

I waited for the woman behind the counter to get off the phone. After a few minutes of animated conversation with whomever, she paused and addressed me with gestures that implied “What in the world are YOU waiting for, weirdo?”

“Uhm, for you to get off the phone? Not important. Anyway, can I get a ticket for the San Marino bus?”

“Oh no no no no,” she explained, as if to a child. “You have to go out of the train station and to the tobacconist across the street.”

Riiiiight. Yeah this is sounding more and more made-up. I’m not sure San Marino actually exists. This is all a ploy to turn me into a donkey.

But, sure enough, the tobacco shop across the street did sell me a bus ticket to San Marino. And in spite of the fact that the ticket looked pretty made-up, the bus driver did accept it, and even more shockingly, he drove me to San Marino.

Once you get there, San Marino seems an awful lot like Italy, but for the love of God, don’t tell anybody there that. San Marino and Vatican City are the two microstates that exist within the borders of Italy, independent countries that seem more like weird historical anomalies than anything anyone can explain.

Both did provide me with a lot of amusement when covid regulations were published, though. Lovingly detailed rules were released, specifying which of the many countries in the world you could and could not enter San Marino or Vatican City from. The reason this is funny is that neither San Marino nor Vatican City have an airport. Unless you were going to drop in from outer space, the only country it is physically possible to enter either one of them from is Italy. But be sure to check the rules to see if you're allowed to pole-vault in from Norway first.

San Marino’s capital city, conveniently also called San Marino, sits perched upon the fantastically-named Monte Titano, the tallest peak in San Marino. Sheer cliffs yawn down all around you. If you take the bus from Rimini in Italy, it drops you off in a little parking lot where you can take a glass elevator up to the city’s main streets, which zig zag their way improbably up the steep mountainsides.

It’d be a pretty good country to be in when the zombies invade.

The main thing to do in San Marino is to climb up the Three Towers. These are medieval towers built upon the peaks of Monte Titano, from which you can see all 24 square miles of The Most Serene Republic of San Marino below you, and also gaze out across a whole lot of stuff that I’m pretty sure isn’t San Marino.

To get to the towers, you hike up San Marino’s cobbled streets, which is slow going because you’re constantly going up and down stairs to get from one street to another and then hiking carefully up some steep-ass slant, forever.

On the walk up, you’ll pass several completely incongruous stands selling a shitload of swords and guns. Is that because these things aren’t legal to buy in Italy? Or because people associate chintzy souvenir weaponry with San Marino, for some reason? No idea.

The first tower is called Guaita, or “first tower.”

Inside, there’s a little museum with a bunch of random spears and shit and some reminders that this was used as a prison at one time, like everything that’s old enough has been at some point in its history.

Real old-timey prisoner graffiti had been preserved on the walls of the cell.

Outside there’s a JEEEEEEEEEESUS a staggering view from the tower walls of everything on the entire Earth below you.

I know you can see all of San Marino in these photos, and beyond it, but I have no idea where the actual line is. I know that water is in Italy. I think the official measure is if you fall off this tower, wherever you land is probably San Marino. Unless the wind is blowing.

In the other direction you can see the fortified courtyard of the tower.

Climbing up into the top corner of the tower, defensive openings for archers all along the floor make the view down a vertiginous sight, not helped at all by the sketchy-feeling floor and the cold wind blowing up your pant legs.

Then in the distance, the beautiful sight of Tower 2.

Out of nowhere a paraglider powered by, eerily silent, close enough to casually say “Ciao” to us without yelling as he puttered by.

Holy moly. Why am I not doing that? Where’d he come from and where does he get those wonderful toys? Dude was just sitting in a little chair with a fan on it, like he’d just ejected out of his Corolla. He hung casually below a big parachute, seeming to be shockingly under-prepared to be flying around like a Greek god. I chucked looking at the helmet he was wearing. Helmets seemed kind of funny in this context, since this is an activity where you’re either going to impact nothing at all or else something so catastrophic that a helmet’s just going to make it easier for them to find all of your teeth.

In the distance, more paragliders circled the second tower like mosquitoes.

Oh, there were also some cannons you shouldn’t sit on, you dirty cannon-sitters.

The second tower was called Cesta, or “second tower.” Inside, there was a museum full of a lot, lot, lot of guns. Like more than your uncle has. Most of them were little Derringers and teensy widdle Dutch guns, for some reason.

What do you get the man who has everything except a gun that can shoot itself?

But my favorite was the folding rifle.

Wait, why isn’t this more of a thing? It’s like a sawed-off shotgun without all the work. Are these illegal or something?

“Looks like you brought a pistol to a rifle fight, boy!”

“*CLACK*”

“I rescind my previous mockery, good sir.”

Outside, there was a killer view of the first tower, which is the classic SAN MARINO photo.

A hike through the woods brings you to the third tower, which is called Montale or “the tower you can’t go in.”

It wasn’t all that.

It was used as yet another prison and the only door is 23 feet off the ground, which is just poor door placement if you ask me.

The other big thing to do in San Marino is to walk around and look at stuff, which I obliged.

This store looks like a Target but they just sold a bunch of guns. Actually they might have a better claim to the Target name than the place where you buy toilet seat covers, now that I think about it.

I wasn’t kidding about there being a completely inexplicable number of guns and swords for sale in San Marino.

Other shops tried to keep up by carrying other inexplicable things like helicopters and *squint* crossbows? Oh wait no, there are a shit ton of guns in there too, whew.

Want to drink out of something shaped like a dong? Knock yourself out.

There’s also food!

Welcome to In or Out, aka “Make Up Your Damned Mind, Kid” Burger.

Elsewhere, I had some pretty terrible pizza with no cheese on it. San Marino hasn’t heard of veganism yet, once they get tired of all the guns and swords they might look into it.

The historical center of San Marino is quite pretty.

By nightfall I had seen all of San Marino and had resigned myself to the fact that I couldn’t even find something vegan at the goddamned grocery store and was going to be supping on crackers, Jack. I made my way back up the mountain to take in the nighttime view of Tower One from Tower Three.

Damn, Sam.

In the year 301—wait, that just looks weird. Not much must have happened in that first millennia, because my brain is not at all used to seeing year numbers below a thousand. 301 just looks like an apartment number. What if something had happened in the year 15? That would look really weird.

Anyway, some year that we won’t mention by name, a Croatian monk named Saint Marinus (not his name at the time, unless his parents had brilliant foresight) left his job as a stonemason in Rimini to go up in the mountains and found a monastery. He then said you know what guys, this is a country. And he was so cool that nobody could bring themselves to disagree or tell him that’s not how you found a country. Even 1700+ years later. And so San Marino is the oldest independent state in the world. True story.

Basically between then and now, a bunch of people tried to invade San Marino and take it over, but they always fucked it up somehow, because it was foggy or somebody in San Marino was buddies with Napoleon or whatever happened. So it remained San Marino. Maybe it helped that nobody has ever heard of it or knows where it is.

Abraham Lincoln was an honorary citizen of San Marino. I don’t know what that means.

I visited all the European microstates on this trip, and aside from the island ones the rest all seemed like they were really just a tax shelter or some Illuminati dude’s private fiefdom, none of them really made sense in terms of why they hadn’t been absorbed into their much larger neighbors at some point in history. Or in the case of San Marino and Vatican City, into the host countries they existed on like a mole or a beauty mark. But it’s fun that they’re there.

San Marino boasted the highest rate of covid infections in the world when I was there, because there are like 12 people in San Marino and three of them had the sniffles. This is the kind of country where the covid rate shoots up and everybody goes “Goddammit, Steve!”

I had intended to leave San Marino on the first bus the next morning, a plan I fucked up by severely underestimating how long it would take me to make my way down the steep-ass streets and a hundred staircases to get to the bus parking lot down below. By the time I got there, the bus was long gone. It was just me and a dude who had passed out drunk the night before, flat on his back on the pavement, right outside the glass elevator. His pants were down around his OH MY GOD I just saw way more of that dude than I wanted to.

I stood there for a while, hoping the bus was just really late, while the San Marino police eventually arrived and stared at each other, wondering what to do about this passed-out drunk guy. He hadn’t moved a millimeter while I had been there. Holy cow, is he dead? The cops shrugged.

I made my way back up to my hotel, grabbed the key nobody had bothered to pick up when I checked out earlier, and took a nap in my room until the next bus came three hours later.

This time, I got the timing right and the bus took me and two other people back to Rimini, where I would tell the locals tales of the magical land of San Marino.

“Bullshit!” they would say. “That sounds completely made-up.”

Yes, my friends. Yes it does.