Our day trip to San Marino

I've been way too slow to finish off blogging about our trip to Italy over the holidays.....so here's a quick recap of the last things we saw and did.

I'm fascinated by the "little countries" of Europe, so I was very excited to make a day drip from Bologna to the Republic of San Marino.  Getting there took a train ride from Bologna to Rimini, a small city on the Adriatic coast.  After that, we had about a 45 minute bus ride to San Marino City, which is the capital of the country and higher up in elevation.

Leaving Italy for San Marino!

We had clear weather so the views of the surrounding Italian countryside were stunning.

The City of San Marino is small but was immaculately clean.  The Tourist Office offers to stamp passports for a fee of 5E/person, so clearly they are used to day-trippers (like us) who come for the novelty of visiting such a small nation.  I was not certain of the validity of such a stamp (having to pay for it felt illegitimate somehow), so we skipped the passport stamps from San Marino.

The national flag up close.

Visitors to San Marino clearly shop a lot, since there was store after store selling everything from leather to, oddly, weapons of all shapes and sizes (Bob assured me these guns are for paintball......).  We weren't interested in shopping (other than getting our customary magnet), but we were interested to see that this store's name, and the font used, looked quite similar to a famous American brand....

What we enjoyed most was exploring 2 of the 3 peaks of San Marino--Guaita and De La Fratta.  The structures on the tops of these peaks looked so formidable and strong, both from far away and up close!

Walking from one peak to the next and enjoying the views.

We climbed through trap doors out onto narrow tower walkways, ran along think fortress walls, and imagined ourselves back in a time when this small nation was a strong power.  

Bob and I don't take a lot of selfies, but we thought this one turned out well. :)

As the day went on, fog started to roll in below us until the landscape was no longer visible.  But it made for one of my favorite pictures of our whole trip!

San Marino was a great day trip from Bologna, and a place that we will likely never visit again...but we're certainly glad we've been there once!