San Marino: The Oldest Republic You’ve Never Thought About

by Joseph Harris

On San Marino, a very stubborn stonemason, priest-strangling pasta, and a small area of Los

Angeles that would absolutely secede if it could.

Questions Asked While Driving Past the Turnoff

What is San Marino really?

The oldest republic on earth. Founded in 301 AD by a Christian stonemason named Marinus who climbed a mountain to escape Roman persecution and apparently never came down. It has been a sovereign republic ever since. Seventeen hundred years. The United States has been at this for two hundred and fifty. San Marino was doing it before Rome fell.

Do you need a visa?

No. You just drive in. There is no border crossing in any meaningful sense. You are in Italy, then you are in San Marino, and the main evidence is a sign.

Are they Italian?

Sort of. They speak Italian. They use the euro. They eat Italian food. But they are emphatically not Italian. Of the patchwork of multiple rival states into which the Italian peninsula remained carved until their 1861 unification, San Marino is one of only two entities — the other is the Vatican City — that successfully resisted political absorption. When Italy unified in 1861, San Marino looked at the whole enterprise and said no thank you, and Italy, remarkably, said fine.

Do Italians like them?

San Marino sheltered Garibaldi’s troops during the war of unification, and Garibaldi, being a man who understood the value of a favor, extracted a guarantee of independence from the newly formed Italian state before he accepted the help. San Marino has been independent ever since. That is a very Italian arrangement.

Does anybody go there?

More than 1.9 million people visited in 2019. For a country of 34,000 people, that is roughly 56 tourists for every resident. They are not keeping the riffraff out. The riffraff is the economy.

What do they eat?

Flatbread with fillings called piada. Strozzapreti — priest strangler pasta — with meat sauce and cheese. Baked pasta with smoked meat. Chickpea soup with garlic and rosemary. The cuisine of Romagna, which surrounds them on all sides, which is the cuisine of people who have been eating very well on a mountain for seventeen centuries and see no reason to change.

What exactly are they doing in Italy anyway?

Seventeen hundred years of minding their own business on top of a mountain, which is apparently sufficient justification. San Marino ranks among the wealthiest countries in the world by GDP per capita. The riffraff, it turns out, is doing fine.

Is everybody OK with this?

I’m not sure I am. But the stonemason was not asking.

Should you have taken that turn?

Yes. Obviously yes.

Answers Arrived at Too Late to Be Useful on That Particular Trip

What is San Marino, exactly?

This is a question I have been asking since I drove past the turnoff on the way from the Adriatic coast toward Umbria and did not take it, a decision I have been reconsidering ever since. Time did not allow. The question remained. So let me answer it now, because the answer is more interesting than you would expect from a place that most people have never thought about and many people cannot find on a map.

San Marino is the oldest republic on earth. It was founded in 301 AD by a Christian stonemason named Marinus who climbed a mountain to escape Roman persecution and apparently never came down. He built a small church on top of Mount Titano, declared the whole enterprise a community of free people, and that was that. The United States has been at this for two hundred and fifty years. San Marino was doing it before Rome fell. Before the Visigoths arrived. Before the concept of Italy existed in any form that anyone would recognize. A stonemason climbed a mountain in 301 AD and said this is mine and nobody has successfully argued with him since.

When Italy unified in 1861 — a project that took decades and involved Garibaldi and considerable bloodshed and the general reorganization of the entire peninsula — San Marino looked at the whole enterprise and said no thank you. And here is the remarkable part: Italy said fine. This is because San Marino had sheltered Garibaldi's troops during the war of unification, and Garibaldi, being a man who understood the value of a favor, extracted a guarantee of independence from the newly formed Italian state before he accepted the help. San Marino has been independent ever since, surrounded on all sides by a country it has declined to join, which is a very particular form of stubbornness that the Sammarinese wear as a national virtue.

Do you need a visa to visit? You do not. You drive in from Marche or Emilia-Romagna, there is a sign, and you are in a different country. The border is essentially theoretical. The currency is the euro. The language is Italian. The food is Italian. The people are, to all observable evidence, Italian. And yet San Marino is emphatically, constitutionally, historically not Italian, and will explain this to you at length if you suggest otherwise, with the patience of a people who have been correcting this particular misunderstanding for seventeen centuries and have gotten very good at it.

The republic is sixty-one square kilometers. For reference, that is roughly the size of San Francisco without the water. It has a population of approximately thirty-four thousand people. It receives between three and four million tourists a year. That is somewhere between eighty-eight and one hundred and eighteen tourists for every single resident, which means that at any given moment the republic of San Marino contains dramatically more people who are confused about where they are than people who live there. The Sammarinese have built an entire economy around this confusion, which is, again, exactly what a stonemason who climbed a mountain and refused to leave would do.

The money comes from tourism, banking, ceramics, postage stamps — San Marino postage stamps are only valid for mail posted within the country, which means they are purchased almost exclusively by philatelists who will never use them, which is a revenue model of such elegant absurdity that I cannot help but admire it — and the sale of duty-free goods to Italians who drive up the mountain to buy things slightly cheaper than they can get at home. San Marino is, among other things, one of the wealthiest countries in the world by GDP per capita. The stonemason's republic is doing fine.

Now. The food.

San Marino's cuisine is, predictably, Italian. Specifically it is the cuisine of Romagna, the region that surrounds it, which is the cuisine of pasta and flatbread and cured pork and hard cheese and the particular directness of a mountain kitchen that has never had the luxury of being precious about anything. The piada — or piadina, the flatbread of Romagna — is the bread of the republic, stuffed with whatever the pantry provides. The pasta is strozzapreti.

Strozzapreti means priest strangler. This requires some explanation, or rather several competing explanations, none of which are inconsistent with each other. The first is that the dough is rolled so vigorously, with such force and conviction, that the motion resembles strangling. The second is that the pasta is so good that greedy priests, who historically collected a portion of everything the peasants made, ate too much of it and choked. The third, and perhaps most satisfying, is that the peasant women of Romagna who rolled this pasta every day were thinking about the tithe collector when they did it, and the name is the record of what they were thinking. All three explanations are plausible. All three are consistent with the regional attitude toward institutional authority. San Marino was founded by a man fleeing Roman persecution. The pasta is named for strangling clergy. There is a through line.

The smoked and cured meats of the mountain are the other defining ingredient. San Marino raises hogs on the hillsides and has been curing and smoking pork in the mountain air since before it had a formal government, which gives it a considerable head start on the rest of us. The mountain ham — braised slowly with wine and honey and herbs until the salt mellows and the deep pork flavor underneath emerges — is the kind of dish that seventeen centuries of refinement produces. You cannot rush it. The republic has never rushed anything.

I want to say something about San Marino, California, because the comparison is irresistible and I am not going to resist it. San Marino, California sits next to Pasadena in the San Gabriel Valley, and it is to the Los Angeles metropolitan area what the republic is to Italy — a small, wealthy, fiercely independent enclave that has decided the arrangement suits it and sees no reason to change. The Huntington Library is there. The old money is there. The gates and the garden walls and the very specific quality of a place that knows exactly who it is and is not especially interested in your opinion are very much there. If San Marino, California could declare independence from Los Angeles County it absolutely would, and it would write an excellent constitution, and it would be extremely well-funded, and it would have very strong opinions about parking. I lived in Los Angeles. I can say this. From their point of view I was one of the riffraff. I am at peace with this.

The original San Marino has been minding its mountain for seventeen hundred years. The California version has been minding its property values since 1913. Neither one is interested in your opinion of the arrangement.

I should have taken that turn. Next time I am driving from the Adriatic toward Umbria and I see the sign, I am taking it. I want to eat strozzapreti in the oldest republic on earth and drink the local wine and ask a Sammarinese person whether they consider themselves Italian, and watch the expression on their face when I do.

In the meantime, Fort Bragg. Tuesday night. Twenty-nine dollars. The food of a republic that has been saying no to Italy for seventeen centuries and getting away with it, which is honestly an inspiration to all of us.

The stonemason was right. The mountain was worth it.

Reservations: (707) 964-6844 or click here

124 East Laurel Street, Fort Bragg, California