This is the ninth installment in our Days of Wine and Music series. This week we present the Republic of San Marino in a nutshell. There is much that can be written about this tiny country whose highly attractive attributes could easily serve as a model for less successful states, but space and time constraints—we try to limit the reads here to three minutes—prevent us from doing so.
We will start by citing from a book published over a hundred years ago. Despite its age, it is still a good read and nicely summarizes some of the most attractive aspects of this country. The title should give our readers pause: A Freak of Freedom or the Republic of San Marino by J. Theodore Bent (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1879). Bent begins by geographically anchoring his subject for his readers: “Situated at a distance of about twelve miles from the Adriatic at Rimini, the volcanic rock which forms the nucleus of the small Republic of San Marino has overlooked a great highroad of nations for centuries. The ‘via Emilia’ of Roman days is now succeeded by the railroad from Bologna to….” And throughout those centuries, “San Marino has shown a constancy to the motto of ‘liberty’….” At this point the reader might well be asking why a nation that reveres the concepts of liberty and freedom and abhors their polar opposite—tyranny—should be considered a “freak,” or an outlier. There’s something wrong with this picture, isn’t there?
*Terragio67, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Drinking Japan 