We had already been to San Marino three times before, but we decided to return there this year in December because the previous times I was too young to remember well the town but also because we realized that strangely we had always limited our visit to a small portion of it, the most well known one. Before getting to San Marino remember that you may find a really strange climate or at least, as far as I can remember, we have always found it: a rainy weather, sometimes accompanied by strong wind, sometimes by fog, which doesn’t allow you to see farther than fifty metres, sometimes all that together. While planning your visit notice that the best existing “tourist guide” of San Marino is probably the WH nomination file: all the monuments are well described there so just take the information from there. Then remember also that it is really touristy at every season, with the streets full of people getting there almost always for shopping (and there are thousands of shops with lower prices and taxes), as it is demonstrated by the fact that you won’t find anyone in the remotest streets without shops, arguably even nicer than the main ones. If you go there by car, you will probably arrive from Rimini on a two lane road, from which you will get a beautiful view on the entire Mount Titano (naturally if it isn’t covered entirely by fog) with its characteristic profile with three peaks each crowned by a tower. If it is summer (in winter however it is the best option) don’t even try to park uphill because you won’t probably find a place, but park in Borgo Maggiore (there a lot of places where you don’t pay for parking so avoid the main parking lot) and take the cable car to get to San Marino. Possibly go there early in the morning to avoid the biggest crowds and if you would like to visit Borgo Maggiore, the centre of which is just a few metres from the main parking lot, go there later.

Borgo Maggiore itself is the second most inhabited municipality (or as it is called there, castle) in the Republic, with San Marino being paradoxically only the third one. It is a nice historic village, but as there are many other, nothing else: don’t spend your time there unless you have enough and you will get a beautiful view of the square from the cable car, from which it looks nicer than it actually is. Apart from few modest historic palaces, there is a church, a fountain, a long modern market portico and the clock tower, the most prominent landmark: all in very simple and humble style, almost rural. It is probably part of the WHS because it can be considered as a historic downhill quarter of San Marino: so not a bad decision to include it.

San Marino is a very small town in dimensions, but what makes the visit of it quite long is the fact that it is situated on the quite steep slope of Mount Titano, and this makes it larger than it seems, because the streets run parallel on different levels. Not far from the upper end of the cable car is the main square, a beautiful space similar to a terrace, which offers, as many other points of the town, beautiful views on the surrounding hilly landscape. The nice Public Palace (a sort of parliament) and the Parva Domus palace overlook on it. The square was once a typically medieval space, but it was reconstructed in style and monumentalized in the 19th and 20th centuries; many other monuments in the same period underwent similar reconstructions and restorations, alongside with the construction of new buildings and the creation of new urban spaces, mainly directed by the local architect Gino Zani, who lowered the degree of authenticity of the town but gave it a very distinctive and rare character, celebrating as a whole the history of the republic. His interventions are particularly noteworthy in two areas: the Saint Agatha’s square, where the Titano Theatre is located, and the area of the Garden of Liburnes, the Cantone, the Crossbowmen’s Quarry and of the Monument of the Volunteers, where he created various staircaises, porticoes, gardens, monuments and open spaces. Near the main square is the Saint Marinus’s Basilica, dedicated to the founder of the town, a nice neo-Classical building, noteworthy because of its stylistic purity, above all in the interior; other nice churches are the medieval Saint Francis’s church and the Saint Quirinus’s church, situated outside the walls, with a strange monument dedicated to Saint Francis in front of it. Don’t miss the really unknown but beautiful street Contrada Omerelli, full of monumental buildings, perhaps the only really authentic and medieval street, looking like the whole town before the 18th century.

Also noteworthy are the three walls (with nice gates), unusual because they are situated on different levels and one of them is outside the town itself. But what makes San Marino really famous are the three towers, the first two looking more like small castles, the third one like an isolated tower (all three unusually located outside the town itself), firstly because it is rare for a town to have three fortified structures, secondly because they are situated exactly on the three peaks of the mount. The first one is easily accessible from the town and is linked to the other two by a breathtaking panoramic path passing trough woods near the edge of the mount, offering beautiful views of the town, the surrounding landscape, the castles themselves and the other slope of the mount, which is more a steep vertical rock face, about 200 metres high. It is a pleasant walk taking about an hour.

San Marino is certainly a place where one can spend a pleasant day wandering around the town (the visit took us about five hours), itself having some rare features, making it quite special, but not justifying enough its WH status. The real luck of San Marino is its most important characteristic: it is the capital of an ancient micro-state. Only because of this fact it is visited by thousands of tourists, only because of this it has its present reconstructed appearance and not the medieval one and once again only because of this it is a WH. In fact, its quite debatable WH status is justified by the great ideals of democracy and freedom that the town represent, to which UNESCO have always paid great attention, and, above all on another great ideal of the WHC: all countries should have at least one WHS inscribed on the WHL.